While workers worry about AI, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI is ‘creating a huge number of jobs’

When it comes to the specter of AI being able to displace workers, Jensen Huang believes the American worker has nothing to fear. During a Monday night conversation with MSNBC’s Becky Quick hosted by the Milken Institute — an economic policy think tank, Nvidia’s jovial CEO said AI was an industrial-scale job generator, not a harbinger of the mass unemployment that so-called “AI arbitrators” have often accused.

A number of different topics were touched upon during the talk, but the main topic that kept coming up was the ongoing economic anxiety surrounding the AI ​​industry and whether it’s legitimately worth worrying about for Americans. At one point, Quick observed: “This is happening very quickly. Is there greater dislocation than we’ve seen in the past leading to greater inequality? And what do we do about it?”

Throughout the night, Huang struck an optimistic note. “AI creates jobs,” Huang emphasized during the discussion, adding, “AI is just that [the] The United States’ best chance to reinvent itself. Huang noted that the AI ​​industry is supported by a new generation of industrial factories — the types that produce devices that serve as critical infrastructure for AI businesses. (Huang’s company sells significantly more of those devices.) These factories necessarily need workers, as does the rest of the burgeoning AI industry.

Huang said that just because a particular task is automated does not mean that a person’s entire job will be replaced. People who think this “misunderstand that job purpose and job mission are related” but not ultimately the same thing, he said. In other words, Huang’s argument is that even when AI takes on a discrete task within a role, it is likely to still be the broader function the employee serves in the organization.

Relatedly, Huang criticized people who claim that artificial intelligence will dominate humanity or wipe out huge sectors of the economy. “My biggest concern is that we scare…people, all the people we tell these science fiction stories to, to the point that AI is so unpopular in the United States, or people are so afraid of it, that they don’t actually engage with it,” he said.

Ironically, much of the “doom” rhetoric has been generated by the AI ​​industry itself, and critics contend that such hyperbole has been used as a marketing gimmick designed to generate hype and excitement for products that are nowhere near the capabilities such rhetoric suggests.

It remains to be seen what kind of long-term impact AI will have on the overall economy. However, reputable financial and academic organizations have suggested that up to 15% of jobs in the United States will be eliminated over the next few years as a result of AI.