Featured Image Credit: Omar Marques / Stringer / Getty
Elon Musk has spent years selling the idea that the future arrives faster than people think, and now, he’s doing the same for the medical field.
Usually, the tech billionaire’s talking about rockets, self-driving promises, or just how generally grand AI is.
This time, on the other hand, he’s aimed the spotlight at something a lot more personal: what happens when machines start stepping into roles we’ve always assumed require human hands and judgment.
Speaking on the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis, Musk argued that medicine is vulnerable to the same pressure every other industry is feeling right now: demand is rising, knowledge is expanding, and there are only so many hours in a human day. In his view, training takes too long, expertise is too rare, and even the best people still have limits.
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With that, Musk suggests medical professionals are now on a deadline, because he believes that by 2030: “AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined”; that’s especially including those in the healthcare sectors.
He summed up his vision with a line that sounds like sci-fi, but he said it like it was a matter of time: “Everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the President receives right now.”
Musk also tied it to shortages, adding: “Right now, there’s a shortage of doctors and great surgeons…It takes a super long time to learn to be a good doctor, and even then, the knowledge is constantly evolving. It’s hard to keep up with everything. Doctors have limited time. They make mistakes.”
Soon after, Musk’s Tesla Optimus robot got pulled into the conversation, positioned as a potential answer to staffing gaps and scaling healthcare to meet demand. When host Diamandis asked Musk how long he thinks it will be before Optimus is better than the best surgeons, Musk revealed the deadline for medical professionals: “Three years. Three years at scale…There [will] probably be more Optimus robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on Earth.”
As for the implications, Musk is essentially driving the idea that this will be good for humanity. The entire balance of the medical profession will shift, as well.
Also, during the podcast, Musk widened the lens to everyday life beyond hospitals. He argued that if robots end up doing most manual labour, building homes, producing food, handling tasks people currently do for wages; then the logic of saving for later could flip.
He said: “Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years. It won’t matter. You won’t need to save for retirement…If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant”. That’s because, as Diamandis summarized, AI will make it so ‘the services will be there to support you’ — in home, healthcare, and entertainment.
At one point in the show, Musk even went on to claim how the technological advancements in medical history, now including those by AI, can help prolong your life: “You’re programmed to die. And so if you change the program, you will live longer.”
