Illustration: Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Ezra Akayan/Getty Images
With all the talk about AI these days, there are a lot of sensational claims about the technology’s impact on the job market.
One common theory, and perhaps the driving force behind the financial incentives behind AI, is that AI will automate everyone’s jobs, or at least most of them. Whether it is good or bad is another question, since scholars have observed that the combination of mass unemployment and monopoly capitalism is not necessarily a recipe for utopia.
Still, more optimistic voices – those of tech CEOs, investors and other market participants – argue that AI automation will usher in an era of unimaginable prosperity for humanity.
For example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang seems to believe that AI’s productivity improvements will completely change everyone’s relationship with work in the near future. But unlike some of his fellow tech billionaires, Huang says AI will allow everyone to take on more tasks than ever before.
“Each job will be different,” Huang said at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., this week, as AI brings a wave of new business concepts and projects. “If your life becomes more productive and the things you’re struggling to do become simpler, it’s very likely that you’ll have more time to pursue things because you have lots of ideas,” the CEO suggested.
Huang cited radiologists as an example, saying AI has allowed them to work “more efficiently” and process more scans than ever before. (In fact, the increased workload is likely the result of a significant shortage of trained radiologists in the United States, the kind of crisis that privately owned AI companies hope will bring in huge profits.)
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was also in attendance at the conference, and with his characteristic wit, he suggested that in the future, work will be as optional as sports and video games are today. “If you want to work, you can go to the store and buy vegetables in the same way, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard,” Musk explained.
“There’s every evidence that you’re going to be more productive, but also busier, because you have so many ideas,” Huang answered. “I think AI will make Elon even busier. AI will make me even busier.”
It remains to be seen whether either mogul’s vision reflects reality, but one thing is for certain: their vast wealth means that even if ordinary people’s lives are thrown into turmoil, they won’t have to worry about it.
Learn more about AI: New Yale University Study Finds AI’s Impact on Employment is Essentially Zero
