Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and many other top executives from technology industry as well as outside have forecasted a ‘doomsday’ picture of Artificial intelligence (AI) wiping away millions of jobs. Amodei has repeatedly called on the US government to prepare for high unemployment. Till a few months back, Sam Altman too said that the magnitude of people who will lose their jobs because of AI is mammoth. All in all, consensus is growing in Silicon Valley and Wall Street about an incoming AI “job apocalypse”. A growing number of global companies, including HSBC, Standard Chartered, Microsoft, Meta, Robinhood and many others have announced that some jobs within their companies are being replaced by AI.However, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos strongly disagrees with this view. Speaking at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris, Bezos offered a starkly optimistic counter-narrative to growing fears over automation, predicting that AI will actually lead to a labor shortage rather than mass human unemployment. Bezos made the remarks to the former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino who asked Amazon founder and Blue Origin CEO David Limp about imparting Bezos’ new AI startup Prometheus with Blue Origin’s engineering.
Jeff Bezos: Stop getting anxious on AI layoffs
Bezos dismissed the widespread anxieties about the technology rendering the workforce obsolete. “I know there’s a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on,” Bezos said. “I totally disagree with this point of view, and I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage because it’s going to make it possible for people to identify more problems.”The billionaire argued that humanity possesses an “endless” list of tasks to accomplish. In his view, AI will act as a tool to lower existing barriers and unlock new productivity, rather than closing doors to human workers. Bezos continued. “We have an endless set of things to invent and we are only limited –– today, we are only limited not by our imaginations but by what we can actually do.”During his appearance, Bezos showcased a rosy technological vision by highlighting his Space venture, Blue Origin, alongside Prometheus, his new AI startup focused on accelerating physical manufacturing.
Layoff numbers hurt Jeff Bezos’ optimism
However, Bezos’s upbeat forecast stands in sharp contrast to the current reality gripping the global job market. According to a report released earlier this month by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, of the more than 97,000 job cuts in May, U.S.-based employers cited AI as the leading reason for 37,579, accounting for 40 percent of all cuts. The findings mark the third straight month that cuts have risen, with AI being a major contributing factor. “The labor market is being reshaped by technology in real time” Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in the report. “AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs and the primary industry citing it is Technology. Technology, already the year’s biggest job cutter, saw its steepest cuts since early 2023, even as it remains the sector with the most hiring plans this year.”
