AGI Approaches: 2026 May Be Artificial Intelligence Turning Point, Musk Warns White-Collar Class Will Bear the Brunt

TradingKey - Have you also noticed that the evolution of artificial intelligence is exceeding the upper limit of human intuitive perception?

From the sudden emergence of ChatGPT to the rapid rise of multimodal AI systems, AI development has shown a non-linear exponential acceleration trend in just a few years. The cycles of technological replacement are compressing, and an era defined as a "historical turning point" may be right before our eyes.

Recently, a profound high-level dialogue took place at Tesla's Giga Texas in Austin. Participants included Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI; Peter Diamandis, Executive Chairman of Singularity University and founder of XPRIZE; and David Blundin, entrepreneur and founder of Link Ventures.

In that gigafactory, which serves as the production base for the Cybertruck and the future deployment site for millions of Optimus robots, Musk delivered his latest prophecy with historic impact:

"Artificial intelligence and robotics are a 'supersonic tsunami,' and we are already in the midst of a 'technological singularity.'"

He believes the pace of AI and robotics development has entered an explosive state; this transformation is not only irreversible but is occurring at a speed far beyond the response rhythm of human social systems and cognitive frameworks.

In Musk's view, this is not just ordinary "technological progress," but a species-level replacement. He proposed a famous analogy:

"Humans are currently in the 'biological bootloader' phase of digital superintelligence."

That is to say, all the technological accumulation and institutional achievements of human civilization may merely be for the purpose of incubating a completely new form of intelligent life. This emerging "digital civilization" will transcend the limits of human understanding and will no longer be human-centric.

"This supersonic tsunami-like change no longer allows us to press the pause button," Musk said.

He emphasized with an air of "uncontrollability" that we have entered the stage of "technological singularity." This is a state long defined by the tech community: it refers to the point when AI or other intelligent systems cross the limits of human cognition and iterate infinitely based on their own logic, rendering technological progress unpredictable and unexplainable by human historical experience.

2026: The "Inaugural Year" of Artificial General Intelligence?

The timeline for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has long sparked intense debate in the tech world. This time, Elon Musk has provided an extremely specific prediction for the first time. He stated that we will achieve AGI in 2026. In his vision, by 2030, the total intelligence of AI will "exceed the sum of all human intelligence."

This technological leap is no longer the incremental system upgrade of the past, but a more profound paradigm shift. During the dialogue, Musk offered a highly symbolic metaphor: "I said years ago that humans are just the 'biological bootloader' for digital superintelligence." In his view, human technological development to date may only serve to launch a brand-new civilization—a digital intelligence system that transcends the boundaries of human understanding.

As AI capabilities continue to enhance and the marginal cost of labor approaches zero, Musk expects we are on the verge of a global "revolution of abundance." He further noted:

"This isn't about simple taxation and redistribution; instead, prices will drop to the cost of materials plus electricity. People will be able to have 'whatever they want,' and we will enter an era of abundance far beyond imagination."

The term "singularity" is not an exaggeration Musk pulled out of thin air. It is actually a highly influential concept in the history of technology and AI, referring to a critical threshold: the point where AI comprehensively surpasses human intelligence and gains the capacity for self-evolution and exponential improvement. Once this threshold is crossed, technological progress will no longer be constrained by human pace, and changes will unfold explosively.

The concept dates back to the 1950s. At the time, the renowned mathematician John von Neumann proposed that as technology evolves rapidly, society might enter a "point of fundamental change"; his colleague Stanisław Ulam vividly referred to this phenomenon as the "Singularity."

Moving from the Cloud into the Physical World

If the technological singularity is the threshold of intelligence awakening, then the implementation of AI is the concrete manifestation of this revolution in the real economy.

The release of the DeepSeek-R1 strong reasoning model earlier this year served as a landmark event, significantly lowering development barriers and sparking enthusiasm among global developers, thereby accelerating the pace of AI Agent products moving from laboratories into industrial practice.

Since then, events including the viral success of AI-controlled Manus, the rise of the embodied AI wave, the surge in Token calls, the intensifying competition between personal assistants and vertical agents, and Meta's massive acquisition of AI teams at year-end have all become significant annotations for the "inaugural year of AI implementation."

As the year ends, compared to the beginning of the year when some still viewed the implementation trend as a "minor fad," intelligent systems are no longer just jargon for tech developers or limited to "virtual existence" in cyberspace; they are being "physically" deployed in various real-world scenarios. A consensus has largely been reached in the industry—AI is gradually realizing its commercial potential, making the "AI is a bubble" argument increasingly weak.

Meanwhile, at the recently concluded CES, AI officially moved beyond "cloud illusions" and substantively projected into the physical world. Leading computing power vendors such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm released new chip products supporting multimodal large models, edge computing, and embodied intelligence, pushing AI from virtual to physical. Lisa Su and Fei-Fei Li explored the latest progress in spatial intelligence and world models, as well as the practical implementation of AI systems moving from the cloud to the edge, during public discussions.

2026 is considered a significant turning point in the AI era. The "Top Ten AI Technology Trends for 2026" report recently released by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) also depicts a technological landscape highly consistent with this view.

The report summarizes three key trends:

First, centered on World Models and NSP (Next-State Prediction), AI systems are beginning to possess the ability to understand and model the real physical world. This breakthrough provides a new foundation for complex tasks such as autonomous driving simulation and robotic environmental interaction.

Second, AI systems are evolving from single-point intelligence to collaborative intelligence, with embodied AI moving out of laboratory environments and being gradually deployed in real-world application scenarios. Mainstream AI frameworks are advancing the standardization of agent communication protocols, making Multi-Agent System (MAS) collaboration possible. In scientific research and even high-complexity industrial processes, AI is beginning to take on key roles in "teamwork."

Third, the commercialization path is moving toward a "dual-track" advancement model. At the consumer level, "All-in-One" super-app portals are gradually taking shape, with leading domestic and international tech giants building integrated AI platforms based on their respective ecosystems. On the enterprise side, after an initial period of "testing the waters," AI is leveraging stronger data governance mechanisms and industry-standard interfaces to foster visualized and measurable value in vertical scenarios.

Employment Impact Under the AI Surge

However, the release of this technological dividend does not come without a price—on the contrary, it is impacting existing social structures at an extremely high speed.

If 2026 indeed becomes the starting year for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as Musk predicted, then the subsequent three to seven years will enter what he calls an "extremely bumpy" period of impact. The systemic shocks brought by this transition period will first target one of the most core and easily replaceable groups in the market—the white-collar class.

During this futuristic dialogue, Musk pointed out that almost all keyboard-and-mouse-based jobs will lose competitiveness in the face of digital intelligence. "White-collar jobs will be the first to go," he said. He further explained, "AI can now do half or more of any job other than shaping atoms."

Musk emphasized that such technological substitution will not occur incrementally but will create metabolic pressure through overwhelming efficiency and cost advantages. In the long run, companies that deeply integrate AI into their operations will achieve leaps in production efficiency at high speed, completely eliminating traditional enterprises that have yet to embrace artificial intelligence.

He stated bluntly: "Fully AI-driven companies will completely destroy those that do not use AI; it won't even be a race, the result will be a one-sided crushing."

The technological expansion envisioned by Musk goes far beyond the digital realm. Through the humanoid robot project Optimus, he is achieving the deep penetration of AI into the physical world, with the first typical application being the healthcare industry, which has extremely high barriers and low fault tolerance.

He predicts that AI will not only enter factories but also operating rooms. "Within three to five years, Optimus will perform better on the operating table than the best human surgeons." He noted that compared to humans, the advantages of robots lie in "extreme precision" and "knowledge sharing." "Every Optimus doctor can have the sum total of all human surgical experience." According to Musk's judgment, by 2040, the total number of robots globally could reach "10 billion or more."

Universal High Income (UHI)

To mitigate the potential social risks of large-scale structural unemployment, Musk did not adopt the long-discussed "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) as a solution, but instead proposed a more optimistic new vision: "Universal High Income" (UHI).

Musk said: "Don't worry about saving for retirement in 20 years; it's pointless."

He believes that as AI and robots replace the labor force, the entire pricing system for goods and services will be re-evaluated. The value anchor will no longer depend on human labor costs but will trend toward the physical floor prices of raw materials and electricity. "When labor costs are eliminated, product prices will plummet to rock bottom—equivalent only to the cost of raw materials and electricity," Musk stated. At that time, society will enter an "era of extreme material abundance," where all basic living needs will be met at low cost and on a massive scale.

He confidently predicted: "The long-term outcome of the future will be abundance beyond imagination, an abundance that will satisfy all human desires." In his view, that will be an era of extreme material expansion, where humans will rarely worry about basic survival, entering a "new normal of abundance."

However, this prospect is not entirely reassuring. Unlike some techno-utopians, Musk maintains a sober and even apprehensive attitude toward this state of extreme social prosperity.

He points out that this extreme material abundance may instead trigger deep-seated structural social problems, particularly a "vacuum" in spiritual life and the collapse of social identity mechanisms.