Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is ending the popular narrative that AI is coming for American jobs, erasing entire professions, even those that require decades of schooling.
In a new episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Huang says AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton predicted five years ago that the world wouldn’t need any radiologists due to AI’s capabilities to study images accurately.
But instead of wiping out an entire profession, Huang says the number of radiologists grew as AI made the specialists more productive.
“And so the prediction was, in fact, that 30 million radiologists would be wiped out. But as it turns out, we needed more. And the reason for that is that the purpose of a radiologist is to diagnose disease, not to study the image. The image study is simply a task in the service of diagnosing the disease. And so now, the fact that you could study the images more quickly and more precisely without ever making a mistake and never getting tired, you could study more.”
Huang says the productivity gains prompted labs and hospitals to hire more radiologists.
“The hospital does better. They have more clients, more patients. As a result, they have better economics. When they have better economics, they hire more radiologists, because their purpose is not to study the images. Their purpose is to diagnose disease.”
Huang adds that the same logic applies to other professions often cited as vulnerable to AI, noting that the technology will never be able to replace someone’s purpose.
“The question is, what is the job? And the purpose of somebody probably hasn’t changed. A lawyer, for example, help people. That probably hasn’t changed. Studying legal documents, generating documents is part of the job, not the job.”
He also says emerging technologies create entirely new industries rather than simply destroying old ones.
“I’m super excited about the robots Elon’s working on. It’s still a few years away. When it happens, when it happens, there’s a whole new industry of technicians and people who have to manufacture the robots. And so that job never existed. And so you’re going to have a whole industry of people taking care of, like, for example, all the mechanics and all the people who are building things for cars, supercharging cars. That didn’t exist before cars. And now we’re going to have robots.”
While Huang believes that AI will make workers more productive, he notes that the technology is coming for jobs that simply consist of tasks.
“If your job is the task. Particularly automation.”
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