‘AI is going to create a labor shortage’: Jeff Bezos thinks AI will create more jobs, not less, as he talks his AI startup Prometheus
For months, fearmongers have warned of AI’s “doomsday,” how it could eventually render whole swaths of the labor force unemployed and leave the rest managing AI employees. But for Jeff Bezos, those fears are overblown, and instead, AI will bring even more jobs than there are people to fill them. Speaking Wednesday at Viva Tech, the annual technology conference held in Paris, the Amazon founder and world’s fourth-richest person delivered a bullish vision of artificial intelligence’s impact on the workforce—and it’s one that he has been building toward for weeks. “I know there’s a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant,” Bezos said in conversation with Blue Origin CEO David Limp. “I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage.” It wasn’t the first time he made that case. In a May interview with CNBC, Bezos used a “bulldozer vs. shovel” metaphor to argue AI would uplift workers rather than replace them, predicted deflation driven by productivity gains, and specifically dismissed displacement fears about skilled workers like radiologists, and software engineers. Then, he called it “labor scarcity.” Humans have “endless” things they want to do, Bezos said at the conference, and are currently held back only by barriers that AI will lower. Unleash those constraints, he argued, and the demand for human effort will only increase. The remarks put him at odds with a significant share of Americans, including some of the most prominent voices in his own industry. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published this month found that half of U.S. respondents fear the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work. A Federal Reserve governor warned in February that a “jobless boom” leaving workers “essentially unemployable”