The future looks bright, at least according to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Fortune reported on Bezos’ speech at Italian Tech Week 2025, where he shared his vision for the future, one that includes living in space and a lack of commuting.
Bezos’ predictions include the expectation that by 2045, robots will travel to work for us. More significant than that, however, is his prediction that within the next decade or two, millions of people will enjoy life in space.
Bezos also shared his disbelief with those predicting the fall of civilization due to AI and technological advances. However, AI is already responsible for people losing their jobs, and the data centers needed to power the technology consume enormous amounts of natural resources. Taking these factors into account, it is easy to see how people can predict pessimism with the continued use of AI.
The potential benefits are also obvious in allowing a machine to synthesize huge volumes of data and draw conclusions or recommendations in minutes; In some cases, it even helps solve pollution and energy problems, even if we have yet to see any such solution that offsets the energy use associated with the many millions of more trivial uses of AI per day.
The Amazon founder isn’t the only billionaire hoping for a future in space, either. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, predicts that in just a decade, college graduates will be working off-planet on interesting (and extremely well-paid) projects, while Elon Musk remains convinced that humans will be living on Mars in 2028.
However, not all the super-rich believe in space travel. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, told James Corden that he believes humanity should prioritize repairing our current planet over planning ventures in space.
“Space? We have a lot to do here on Earth,” he said.
According to Fortune, Gates “has been on the fence about how far we should take the technology.”
While Gates said in an interview with Jimmy Fallon that AI and machines could usher in a new era where people would only have to work a couple of days a week while machines do the rest, he also once explained that if he ever met a time traveler, he would ask them about the future of humanity under AI.
To Gates’ point, it’s also unclear how the tech companies and moguls in charge of these AI innovations would plan to help these productivity increases benefit individual members of society who don’t work for their companies, allowing them to work less without taking a pay cut, as Gates alluded to.
Pete Buttigieg is one of the few politicians who has spoken out about the need for government involvement to help ensure that AI leads to a more utopian society rather than a more dystopian one, saying there should be “AI dividends” that would distribute the wealth of “value that is being created by AI.”
“I think it’s giving everyone a stake in the overall value that the technologies are creating, which again are based on technologies that the taxpayer paid for in the first place in the ’60s,” said Buttigieg, former U.S. Transportation Secretary. “So why shouldn’t we all get a share? Instead of it all going to this small handful of super, super rich people who are consolidating their own power, but like mega mega billionaires consolidating their power, right? We have to have tax policy that does that.”
Bezos, however, remains optimistic. As he said in Italy: “I don’t see how anyone alive right now can be discouraged.”
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