Feeling grateful for all the wonderful ways AI has changed your life yet? Jeff Bezos thinks you should be.
On Wednesday, the Amazon founder brushed aside fears that AI would replace people’s jobs, arguing instead that it will instead be a magical tool that will supercharge productivity and make everyone’s work easier. The luddite masses just haven’t realized it yet.
“If you’ve been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel and somebody’s about to hand you a bulldozer, you should be so happy!” Bezos said in an interview with journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” appearing more disheveled than usual.
“What’s really going to happen is that we’re going to have so much productivity in our economy,” he added, arguing that prices will go down and people will feel comfortable to quit their jobs.
Only there’s a convenient catch: “Assuming we let this technology play out, and don’t hamstring it with regulation too early,” Bezos said.
Bezos, who founded his own AI startup last year, was addressing the recent viral videos of graduating college students booing and shouting down commencement speakers who praised AI. Sorkin commented that this was a sign that the students were “deeply fearful and worried” about the tech’s impact on their job prospects.
But in the billionaire’s enlightened opinion, the youths were misled by fearmongering.
“The reason they’re afraid of that is because all these smart people keep saying that,” Bezos said. “And they’re saying, ‘oh my god, there’s going to be no more radiologists because AI can read x-rays better than a radiologist can. And there’s going to be no more software engineers because AI can program better than a software engineer can.’”
“These people are wrong!” Bezos declared.
It’s still up for debate whether AI will truly start automating vast swathes of the workforce in the long run. The tools are still unreliable and expensive to deploy, and embracing them can backfire.
But many big employers — however ostensibly — are justifying their huge job cuts by pointing to AI, adding to the atmosphere of uncertainty. Jack Dorsey cited efficiency gains from AI as he laid off 4,000 employees at his fintech company Block, or 40 percent of its global workforce. In an even bigger bloodbath, Meta is laying off 8,000 employees while forcing software engineers to use AI agents as much as possible to crank out more code, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg openly bragging about how the tech enables projects that used to require “big teams” to instead be finished by a single person.
When Sorkin asked Bezos to address these job cuts, Bezos floundered. What about Amazon’s recent layoffs that wiped out a staggering 30,000 jobs?
“That’s not because of AI!” Bezos snapped, sounding indignant at Sorkin’s suggestion that AI fueled cuts at Block and Meta as well.
Sorkin pressed that Dorsey had explicitly touted AI as behind the job cuts.
“You’d have to ask Jack about that,” Bezos said. “I don’t know, he must have had a lot of extra people,” he added, laughing.
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