As workers worry about AI, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI is ‘creating an enormous number of jobs’

When it comes to the specter of AI’s job-shifting potential, Jensen Huang thinks the American worker has nothing to fear. During the day a conversation On Monday night, on MSNBC’s Becky Quick, hosted by the Milken Institute — an economic policy think tank — Nvidia’s jovial CEO said AI was a generator of industrial-scale jobs, not the harbinger of mass unemployment that so-called “AI doomers” have often accused it of.

A number of different topics were discussed during the lecture, but a central theme that emerged was the ongoing economic anxiety surrounding the AI ​​industry and whether this was something that Americans should be right to worry about. At one point, Quick noted, “This is happening so quickly. Is there a bigger disruption than we’ve seen in the past that is creating greater inequality? And what are we doing about it?”

Huang struck an optimistic tone throughout the night. “AI creates jobs,” Huang claimed during the discussion, adding that “AI is [the] The United States’ best chance to re-industrialize itself. Huang noted that the AI ​​industry is being driven by a new breed of industrial factories – the ones that produce the hardware that serves as critical infrastructure for the AI ​​business. (Huang’s company, in particular, sells a lot of that hardware.) Those factories necessarily need workers, just like the rest of the booming AI industry.

Just because a specific task is automated doesn’t mean someone’s entire job is replaced, Huang reasoned. People who believe this “misunderstand that the purpose of a job and the task of a job are related” but ultimately not the same, he said. In other words, Huang’s argument is that even when AI takes over a discrete task within a role, the broader function an employee performs in an organization will likely remain.

Related to this, Huang was critical of people who claim that AI will dominate humanity or that it will wipe out large sectors of the economy. “My biggest concern is that we’re scaring people — all the people we’re telling these science fiction stories to, to the point where AI is so unpopular in the United States, or people are so afraid of it, that they don’t really engage with it,” he said.

Ironically, much of the “doomer” rhetoric has been generated by the AI ​​industry itselfand critics argue that such exaggerations have been used as a marketing gimmick designed to generate buzz and excitement for products that come nowhere near the possibilities such rhetoric suggests.

It remains to be seen what long-term impact AI will have on the overall economy. That said, reputable financial and academic organizations have suggested that no less than 15% of the jobs in the US will be eliminated in the coming years due to AI.