New Delhi, Dec. 11 -- Last month, Tesla's chief Elon Musk made some predictions at a US-Saudi investment forum (and repeated them on a podcast with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath). Whether one finds these predictions bold, startling, utopian, insane woor frightening depends on one's views on human nature and society and the world as we understand it. I find them frightening, yet banal. Bad ideas, even frightening ones, have a tendency to keep reappearing.

"My prediction is that work will be optional," Musk said. "Assuming there's a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, then money will stop being relevant at some point in the future." Humanoid robots, Musk said, would become "the biggest industry or the biggest p...