Mark Zuckerberg says artificial intelligence is more likely to increase demand for human labor than eliminate it, pushing back on the idea that automation will inevitably shrink the workforce.
In a new interview with Dwarkesh Patel, the Meta CEO says the medium-term impact of AI will raise, not lower, the need for people.
He uses the scale of Meta to illustrate how companies have thrown some ideas on the back burner because they wouldn’t be economically viable today.
“I tend to think that for at least the foreseeable future, this is going to lead towards more demand for people doing work, not less. Now, people have a choice of how much time they want to spend working, but I’ll give you one interesting example of something that we were talking about recently. So we have like three, almost three and a half billion people use our services every day. And one question that we’ve struggled with forever is: how do we provide customer support…?
The revenue per person isn’t so high that you can have an economic model that people can call in. But also with three and a half billion people using your service every day, I mean, there’d be like a massive, massive number of people, like the biggest call center in the world type of thing. But it would be like $10, $20 billion, something ridiculous a year to staff that.”
With AI, Zuckerberg says that companies start exploring ideas that were previously considered costly. He highlights that AI can take care of the low-level tasks and then consult a human when necessary, creating the need for new roles.
“But let’s say the AI can handle 90% of that. And then if it can’t handle it, then it kicks it off to a person. Okay, now if you’ve gotten the cost of providing that service down to one-tenth of what it would have otherwise been. Then, all right, maybe now that actually makes sense to go do, and that would be kind of cool.”
Zuckerberg says the end result runs counter to the standard automation narrative, pointing out that historically, large efficiency gains tend to expand, not shrink, human employment.
“So the net result is like, I actually think we’re probably going to hire more customer support people. It’s like the common knowledge, or the kind of common belief that people have is that ‘Oh, this is clearly just going to automate jobs and like all these jobs are going to go away.’ That has not really been how the history of technology has worked. It’s been: you create things that take away 90% of the work, and that leads you to want more people, not less.”
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