Hey, AI Job Doomers: Wanna Bet?
Claims that AI-driven job destruction is inevitable could not be further from the truth. AI will boost U.S. productivity and spread new income across the economy.
When I was younger, my older brother and I would constantly make bets over disagreements.
“Wanna bet? Wanna bet?” We did, and I usually lost.
I’m reminded of that every time I read luminaries who predict AI will destroy jobs. It makes me want to say: “Wanna bet?”
In July, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla warned that AI will be able to perform 80 percent of any job within five years, and that by 2040 people won’t need to work to survive. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “CEOs are no longer dodging the question of whether AI takes jobs. Now they are giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go.”
Predicting massive job destruction has become the fashionable way to show you “get it” and sympathize with the so-called huddled masses.
And it’s not just job loss; it’s inequality, too. A Stanford professor recently told me we are headed toward a two-tier society, with elites using AI while everyone else is reduced to a kind of lumpenproletariat.
These claims are not only wrong; they are deeply troubling. Their main effect is to gin up fear and loathing, and we all know what comes next: calls for AI regulation and taxation, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu has urged.
Slowing AI adoption would be a disaster, given America’s three major economic crises:
The massive budget deficit (which the Big Beautiful Bill only made worse)
The demographic crisis of retiring boomers
The anemic rate of labor productivity growth
Taken together, these paint a bleak picture—fiscal strain, entitlement pressures, and stagnant wage growth.
You’d think that now, when we finally have a general-purpose technology capable of boosting productivity growth, leaders and pundits would be cheering AI on, not scaring the living @%$$ out of workers.
Claims that AI-driven job destruction is inevitable could not be further from the truth. In reality, if we’re lucky, AI will boost U.S. labor productivity growth from around 1 percent a year to 2 percent. That additional income will be spent across the economy, supporting workers of all kinds, such as personal trainers, college professors, carpenters, and more.
We need more CEOs like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who rightly calls such doomsday predictions “overly alarmist.”
So, in the spirit of those childhood bets: AI doomers, wanna bet $100 that by September 2027 there will be more white-collar jobs in America than there are today? Any takers, especially CEOs and VCs? Vinod, if you want to take my bet, it’s only about 0.0000011 percent of your net worth.
Having spent 10 years in the internet and ecommerce industry starting from the second half of the 1990s, I recall how many argued the internet would completely strip the human element out of business and, as they are arguing again, create massive job losses. Neither happened. Just the opposite: the internet has transformed the global economy and led to the creation of jobs. Yes, the economy changed, as it became more efficient, both in terms of communication and by reducing many costs. That's not such a bad thing.
I hope AI doesn’t kill all the jobs the same way the introduction of computers caused all that unemployment when they came out. 😗