Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the fear of artificial intelligence sweeping jobs is exaggerated, but that doesn't mean your work won't change dramatically.
“I'm sure 100% of all people's jobs will change,” he told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday. “The work we do at work will change. Our work will change. But that is very likely – my work has already changed.”
As the head of chip makers at the heart of the AI revolution, Huang believes that AI will reshape almost every job through massive task reductions, rather than mass unemployment.
“Some jobs are lost. A lot of jobs are created. And what I want is that the productivity we see in all industries will solve society,” he added.
Huang pushed back the idea that using AI would reduce the ability to think.
“I'm not asking you to think about it for me. I'm asking you to tell me something I don't know or help me solve problems that I wouldn't be able to solve otherwise,” he said.
He said that encouraging AI itself is a skill that requires cognitive effort and clarity.
“The idea of encouraging AI, the idea of asking questions. I spend most of my time asking me questions,” he told Zakaria. “It's a very cognitive skill to ask good questions.”
“As CEO, I spend most of my time asking questions, and 90% of my instructions are actually confused with the questions.”
When interacting with AI, Huang said he doesn't rely on a single response.
“I ask the same questions about multiple AIs, compare each other's notes, then ask them to try their best with all the answers,” he said. “And I think the process of criticizing an answer improves cognitive skills by criticizing an answer.”
For Huang, AI is not a threat to human work, but the “big technology equalizer” that fundamentally redefines it.
“AI will empower people, lift people up, close the technology gap and as a result, more people will be able to do more,” he said.
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Not everyone is that optimistic
Huang believes that AI will rebuild rather than eliminate jobs, but other experts and technical leaders have drawn more destructive pictures.
Adam Dorr, research director at Rethinkx think tanks, predicted that “most of the work will be gone by 2045.”
He cited research from more than 1,500 major technological change teams. This concludes that within 15-20 years of gaining a few percentage points of market share, technology is dominant.
“We are horses, we are film cameras,” he told The Guardian last week, referring to the historical patterns of chaos and the risk that AI can make human workers obsolete.
Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “AI Godfather,” spoke to the CEO Podcast's diary last month, reflecting similar concerns.
He said it was “terrifying” to work as a call centre or paralegal, and recommended that he become a plumber.
Jeffrey Hinton. Mark Blynch/Reuters
Humanity CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar entry-level jobs within five years.
In May, he told AXIOS that AI companies and governments were “sugar coating” the risks of eliminating large-scale jobs in areas like technology, finance, legal and consulting, adding, “I don't think this is on people's radar.”
However, others shared Huang's perspective. In a LinkedIn post last month, Meta AI scientist Yann Lecun said he “looks little to agree with everything Dario says,” claiming that AI will strengthen workers and not replace them.
