SOFTBANK Group Corp Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said Tuesday that 1 billion humanoid robots equipped with artificial intelligence will be created by 2040 to make a “fundamental” change in the work environment.

“The age of humans being the highest life form will end,” Son said at an annual corporate conference, with 100 trillion AI agents, which function autonomously without human instructions, expected to work by that year.

Son said AI agents will be able to replicate themselves and enable other AI agents to evolve and generate even more agents, marking a transition from a human-centred society to an agent-centred one.

“It will be necessary for people to evolve alongside (AI agents) rather than rejecting them,” he said.

The CEO said AI-related industries will account for about 20 per cent of the global gross domestic product by 2040 or seven quadrillion yen ($43 trillion). — Kyodo