A Conversation at the Edge of Tomorrow
We dream of living longer.
We fear old age, illness, death. We develop medicines, search for ways to extend our lives, and hope that one day we might even defeat time itself.
Yet how often do we say:
“I need to kill some time.”
We have asked this question before: why do people who desperately want more life spend so much of it trying to make the hours disappear?
But now another question emerges.
What happens if humanity finally gains an extraordinary amount of free time?
And discovers that it has no idea what to do with it?
Two People, Two Different Worlds
On July 23, 2026, The Economist published an extended interview with Elon Musk, conducted by its editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes.
They discussed artificial intelligence, robotics, economics, and the future of human work.
Musk was describing a world in which machines might produce such an abundance of goods and services that people would no longer need to work simply to survive.
The interviewer had questions.
What happens to jobs?
How will people earn an income?
Who will pay taxes?
How will governments finance their obligations?
As the conversation unfolded, it began to feel as though the two people sitting across from each other occupied different points in time.
One was trying to imagine an economy transformed beyond recognition.
The other was examining that possibility through the rules of the economy we know today.
One was asking what might become possible.
The other was asking what must be preserved to prevent society from falling apart on the way there.
Both perspectives may be perfectly reasonable.
So why did they seem to be talking past each other?
At the Threshold of the Future
Musk matters to this discussion not because he is extraordinarily wealthy, or because his predictions are certain to come true.
He is as capable as anyone else of being mistaken, carried away by an idea, or convinced of something that later proves false.
What makes him interesting here is his attempt to imagine a world that does not yet exist.
He stands with one foot in the present — a world of wages, shareholders, taxes, national borders, debt, and competition.
With the other, he is testing the ground of a future in which some of these concepts may no longer mean what they do today.
Understanding such a vision requires more than asking how it fits within existing rules.
We must at least entertain the possibility that the rules themselves could change.
Otherwise, someone describes a different world, and we keep asking him to balance the books of the old one.
An old yardstick.
It may be perfectly made, precisely marked, and entirely reliable for the purpose it was designed to serve.
But what happens when we use it to measure something it was never meant to measure?
Who Gets the Work?
Musk offered a simple example.
Imagine a world where machines produce excellent food in sufficient quantities for everyone. Nobody needs to grow vegetables to avoid going hungry.
Yet someone might still choose to plant tomatoes in a garden.
Not out of necessity.
Simply because growing tomatoes brings pleasure.
They might share the harvest with a friend.
The tomatoes would matter not because they were produced efficiently, but because someone had grown them with their own hands.
This was Musk's illustration of what human work might become.
The interviewer understood the example, but returned to the practical question: how would people who lost their jobs support themselves?
And here lies a curious contradiction.
We have become so accustomed to equating work with human existence that a world without compulsory employment begins to look like a world without purpose.
But were human beings born merely to earn the right to stay alive?
Work does not define the whole purpose of human existence. For thousands of years, it has largely been the price we paid for survival.
If that necessity were one day removed, why should meaning disappear along with it?
Does a child play to earn a wage?
Does an artist paint solely because the world needs another painting?
Does someone climb a mountain for its economic return?
Perhaps we have spent so long struggling to survive that we have almost forgotten to ask what we wanted to survive for.
Deflation and the Public Purse
The divide became even clearer when the conversation turned to money.
Musk suggested that artificial intelligence and robotics could dramatically increase the production of goods and services.
Under certain conditions, a surge in supply could drive down the general price level — deflation.
In such a world, our assumptions about money, value, and taxation might change.
The interviewer wanted to know where governments would find the money to support their citizens.
An essential question in today's economy.
But Musk was imagining an economy in which the relationships between labour, production, money, and value might be fundamentally different.
If production increased enormously, scarcity itself could take on an entirely different meaning.
The interviewer acknowledged the possibility of deflation, yet kept returning to today's concerns: political polarisation, voter anxiety, economic crises, and government obligations.
It was almost a conversation between a sighted person and a blind one.
But which was which?
The person who could imagine a possible destination without knowing how to reach it?
Or the person who could see every danger along the existing road but kept consulting an old map?
Perhaps blindness begins when we mistake the part of reality we can see for the whole of it.
There is, of course, a danger in going too far in the opposite direction.
More production does not guarantee fair distribution. Falling prices do not automatically make people free, secure, or well fed. The road to abundance could be long, painful, or lead somewhere entirely different from what was promised.
But does that mean we should stop imagining a different way of organising human life?
We must understand the obstacles along the road.
But surely the road exists for more than its obstacles.
Who Comes First?
China entered the conversation.
Musk discussed energy, computing power, robotics, and the technological capabilities of different countries.
He acknowledged China's achievements and did not rule out the possibility of Chinese leadership.
The interviewer brought the discussion back to geopolitics.
Would it be dangerous for America if China moved ahead?
Should Chinese technological development be restricted?
How could the United States preserve its advantage?
Once again, the old yardstick appeared.
One perspective saw the development of new technological possibilities.
The other immediately placed those possibilities within a contest between nations.
East and West.
Us and them.
Who wins?
Who loses?
Who should be allowed to use a discovery?
And who should be prevented from doing so?
Technological power can, of course, be used to destroy as well as to create. Questions of security are legitimate.
But why must cooperation so often look like a concession, and another country's achievement like our own defeat?
Why do we see knowledge that could transform millions of lives primarily as a strategic advantage for one nation over another?
Perhaps we have become accustomed to treating every discovery not as a new possibility for humanity, but as another piece on a geopolitical chessboard.
Except chess pieces do not feel pain.
They are not born.
They do not love.
They do not die.
And humanity is not a chessboard.
Why Return to Killing Time?
Our original question concerned the paradox of free time.
Human beings invent machines to reduce the amount of work they must do.
They reclaim hours of their lives.
Then fill those hours with new obligations, competition, consumption, and the endless pursuit of results.
And find themselves trying to kill time again.
But Musk's interview revealed another layer of the problem.
Perhaps we cannot even imagine liberation.
We continue to think in the terms of a world organised around scarcity.
Scarcity of food.
Money.
Resources.
Time.
And, ultimately, power over others.
We have built economic theories, political institutions, and entire forms of international rivalry around the need to distribute things that are not available to everyone.
But what happens if much of that scarcity disappears?
Could our habits outlive the conditions that created them?
We might continue dividing the world into competing camps, drawing borders, counting winners, and manufacturing scarcity where it could already be overcome.
Not because we need to.
But because we have forgotten how to think otherwise.
What Will People Do?
Imagine, for a moment, that abundance really does arrive.
Not paradise. Not a perfect society.
Simply a world where people no longer have to spend most of their lives struggling for the necessities of existence.
At first, they might want to rest.
Perhaps for a very long time.
Then they would begin looking for things to do.
Someone would grow those tomatoes.
Someone else would compose music.
Another person would build a boat, even though machines had long since learned to build better ones.
Some would devote their lives to children.
Others would study endangered languages or explore the lives of their ancestors.
And one day, someone would look up at the sky.
Why not go there?
Not to gain a military advantage.
Not to claim someone else's resources.
Not to be the first to plant a flag.
Simply to see.
What does noon look like on the Moon?
What is the sand of Mars like?
What would someone see standing near the rings of Saturn?
Could we ever reach the nearest star?
Perhaps a person would want to experience firsthand what had previously existed only in textbooks.
And then imagine a conversation with Einstein.
Not to worship a famous name.
But to tell him how far humanity had travelled, and ask what even the greatest minds of his time had failed to see.
Has human curiosity ever been limited to the need to put food on the table?
Perhaps that is when the true history of human freedom would begin.
What If We Choose the Old Ways Again?
There is another possibility.
We learn to travel between planets.
We develop extraordinary sources of energy.
We master technologies that would seem miraculous today.
And then we begin fighting over new territories.
We divide the Moon.
Dispute ownership of Mars.
Establish spheres of influence around distant stars.
Build armies to defend new borders.
And discover that although our technology has reached the future, our thinking remains trapped in the past.
We would possess the means to transform entire worlds, yet continue to think like someone whose greatest achievement is taking something from a neighbour.
One path leads towards exploration, discovery, and new knowledge.
The other carries humanity's oldest conflicts into the universe.
Perhaps that choice matters more than which nation builds the most powerful machine first.
A Connection Across Time
There is another human ambition that cannot be measured in taxes or economic output.
Understanding ourselves.
Where did we come from?
Who were our ancestors?
What knowledge disappeared with them?
What survives in languages, customs, and the memories passed between generations?
Our genes connect us biologically to the past, although they do not contain our ancestors' personal memories.
But how much more might we discover through that connection?
What if future discoveries allow us to recover chapters of human history that are now lost?
Our descendants would then become more than another generation of workers and consumers.
They would continue a journey that began long before any of us existed.
Each generation carries forward questions inherited from the last.
And every human life cut short is more than a personal tragedy.
It is also a loss of possibilities humanity will never get to see.
How strange, then, to regard one nation's victory over another as humanity's highest achievement.
What does humanity gain by destroying those who might have helped carry its journey forward?
The Human Being of Tomorrow
We tend to imagine the future as a collection of technologies.
Computers.
Robots.
Spacecraft.
Artificial intelligence.
But perhaps the most important question is not what machines we will build.
It is what kind of human beings we will bring into the world those machines create.
People who know only how to win?
Who measure human worth in wealth?
Who regard every achievement by someone else as a threat?
Or people capable of celebrating a discovery made thousands of miles away, even when the credit belongs to another country?
People who do not need someone else to lose in order to feel victorious.
People who see the achievements of others not as glory stolen from them, but as an expansion of humanity's shared possibilities.
Surely humanity must mean something more than a collection of nations competing against one another.
It must also mean our shared ability to sustain life and explore the world.
So How Do We Kill Time?
Musk may be wrong.
The interviewer may be right about the dangers.
Abundance may arrive far later than predicted, be distributed unequally, or require solutions we have not yet imagined.
But their conversation exposed something important.
It is difficult to explain a possible future to someone determined to measure it entirely by the standards of the present.
And this goes far beyond a single interview.
It is how we often encounter unfamiliar ideas.
Before we try to understand them, we ask whether they fit inside the frameworks we already know.
When they do not, we are quick to call them wrong.
Perhaps we have misunderstood the problem itself.
Throughout history, humanity has struggled to free itself from the demands on its time.
Now, for the first time, we can begin to imagine a world in which far more of that time might belong to us.
Yet we keep asking how we will keep people occupied.
Why not ask the people themselves?
Perhaps someone has always dreamed of seeing the stars.
Perhaps someone wants to understand the lives of their ancestors.
Perhaps someone will discover a purpose that no economist, politician, or creator of artificial intelligence has yet imagined.
Perhaps we have spent so long trying to free humanity from compulsory work that we have forgotten to ask what people wanted freedom for.
The greatest danger of the future may not be that people will have nothing to do.
It may be that we will once again force them to spend their lives doing what they have struggled for thousands of years to escape.
We may finally learn to stop killing time.
But will we know how to avoid killing the future itself?
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Afterword: The Unasked Question
Yet one question remained in that conversation — perhaps a more fundamental one than jobs or taxes.
If machines eventually free people from the need to work for survival, and abundance ceases to be the privilege of a few, what happens to the state itself?
The state as we know it developed in a world of scarcity, borders, property, competition for resources, and the need to govern people.
But if that world changes, why should the state remain unchanged?
What would it be needed for?
To protect people?
From whom?
From other people living in the same abundance, but on the other side of a border?
Could we reach a point where the main justification for preserving old political structures is the need to defend humanity against threats those very structures continue to create?
Perhaps Musk understands just how far his own assumptions might lead.
But he did not say it.
And the interviewer kept asking who would pay the taxes.
Perhaps that was where the old yardstick finally reached its limit.