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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a simple message for workers uneasy about AI’s rise: Stay optimistic. As AI reshapes work and challenges how employees see their roles, Bezos suggests that there is more reason for confidence than concern. 

“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 at Blue Origin’s Florida launch site earlier this week.

On a broad scale, AI is going to “elevate” people, Bezos predicted. “We are going to have so much productivity in our economy,” he added.

Bezos said that if we allow AI to develop without being “hamstrung,” it could make life more comfortable for everyone. In his view, powerful technology could drive costs down across the board, leading to cheaper groceries and more affordable homes. Bezos imagines a world where productivity gains from AI show up as deflation instead of higher prices. People’s money stretches further, and their standard of living rises. 

Other leaders warn of AI’s impact on jobs

Other influential voices have a different message, warning that AI could trigger major job losses and economic disruption. 

Geoffrey Hinton, a often called the Godfather of AI because of his early research on neural networks and major discoveries in deep learning, is one figure sounding the alarm. Last year, Hinton predicted that AI would replace “everybody” in white-collar jobs. 

He also challenged the idea that AI would create new jobs and argued that if AI automated tasks, people would have few occupations left to pursue. “You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it [AI] just couldn’t do,” Hinton said.

Another AI leader issuing a warning is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Last year, he predicted that AI would wipe out half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years, causing unemployment to rise to 20%.

“As with most things, when an exponential is moving very quickly, you can’t be sure,” Amodei said at a summit in September. “I think it is likely enough to happen that we felt there was a need to warn the world about it and to speak honestly.”

Roman Yampolskiy, a computer science professor at the University of Louisville, had an even more dire prediction. He warned last year that AI could cause the unemployment of “99%” of all workers by 2030. 

“You have free labor, physical and cognitive, trillions of dollars of it,” Yampolskiy said on podcast in September. “It makes no sense to hire humans for most jobs if I can just get a $20 subscription or a free model to do what an employee does.”