Billionaire Jeff Bezos is pushing back on the narrative that AI will trigger a wave of job displacement, believing that the technology will ultimately cause labor shortages.
The News
In a new CNBC interview, Bezos says people who are predicting AI-driven job losses are just wrong because he believes the technology is a tool that elevates worker productivity rather than replace them.
Bezos also predicts that the AI-driven productivity gains will eventually lead to labor shortages as the prices of goods and services get cheaper over time.
“What’s really going to happen is that it’s going to elevate all of these people. You’ve been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel and somebody is about to hand you a bulldozer. You should be so happy…
We’re going to have so much productivity in our economy that a lot of people who have two-earner income households, one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce. That’s why we’re going to have a labor shortage. Because of the productivity gains, you’re going to be able to afford things. I predict we’ll actually have deflation.”
According to Bezos, the key trait that will enable people to thrive in the age of AI is to have the mindset of an entrepreneur.
“If I’m a software engineer, I need to up-level and think to myself, what am I really doing? What a good computer science software engineer really does is identify problems and help solve them. And the code is almost just a piece of execution that helps with that. But the real job is going to be identifying problems and helping to solve them…
We humans are never going to run out of problems, and we’re never going to run out of the need for solutions. It’s just that the work is going to be done at a higher level.”
What It Means for Workers
Bezos just laid out the path for success when he said that everyone’s job is now to identify and solve problems. When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sounded the alarm last year that white-collar workers will be massively disrupted in five years, he was referring specifically to roles that rely on employees’ knowledge to get the job done. Amodei likely believes that since AI is an intelligence tool, the need for roles that rely on knowledge will likely disappear.
But Bezos has likely taken the knowledge factor into account when he said that the future belongs to people who find pain points and solve them. College graduates are often trained to solve rather than look for problems. They join companies that have successfully pinpointed pain points to employ their skills and knowledge.
Bezos is now saying that people have to level up by developing the skill to find problems, while highlighting that humans will never run out of problems to solve. For people who were laid off or are looking for a job, Bezos appears to suggest that your energy will likely be better spent in finding and solving a pain point using AI instead of sending hundreds of applications at a time when countless people are likely competing for the same role.
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