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At an investment forum in Washington in November 2025, Elon Musk made a prediction that sounded almost absurd. Within 10 or 20 years, he said, work could become optional. He compared it to growing vegetables at home. Most people buy vegetables because it is easier, but some still grow them because they enjoy doing it. Musk believes work could eventually become a similar choice. He then went further and said that continued progress in artificial intelligence and robotics could

A polished website tells you less about a business when almost anyone can produce one in an afternoon. The same might become true of a confident product description, a persuasive application or a detailed research report. Good presentation used to offer at least some evidence that someone had invested time, skill or money. As those appearances become easier to reproduce, we may have to work harder to find out what is behind them. George Akerlof described a related problem in

The appeal of gig work is easy to understand. You can open an app, earn some money and stop when something else needs your attention. For someone taking classes, caring for a child or trying to cover an unexpected expense, that can be considerably more useful than a job with a fixed schedule. The trouble starts when we treat control over working hours as evidence of control over the job itself. A worker can choose when to log in while having very little influence over what th

Suppose a task that takes you an hour suddenly takes ten minutes. It seems reasonable to expect fifty minutes of free time. At work, though, that depends on whether anyone still wants the same amount of output. If your manager can now ask for six versions of a presentation instead of one, the afternoon fills up again. The technology has delivered exactly what it promised. You are producing more with the same effort. You just have not gained the thing you actually wanted. Econ

Imagine a service that people currently pay for becoming available free, at the same quality. Perhaps it is a translation tool, a basic software product or a resource for learning a language. Customers keep the money they would have spent and still get the benefit. That looks like progress. Yet the direct spending associated with the old service has disappeared. Depending on what replaces it, one part of the measured economy could shrink while the people using it become bette

It can feel strange to talk about slower economic growth while watching technology improve so quickly. A phone can perform tasks that once required an office full of equipment. Software can produce an answer in seconds that previously took hours of work. Yet the existence of impressive inventions does not tell us how quickly the whole economy can expand. The American growth slowdown that developed over recent decades reflects changes in the workforce, investment and productiv

We normally assume that a better forecast makes everyone better off. It gives us time to prepare and helps us avoid mistakes. Insurance reveals a complication. The ability to share a risk can depend on nobody knowing exactly who will suffer the loss. If a new prediction identifies the unlucky people before they arrange coverage, those people may find that the information has made their financial position much worse. Consider a deliberately simplified town where every house ha