At the VivaTech conference in Paris (Europe’s biggest startup and tech event), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos argued for an extremely optimistic vision of the future of artificial intelligence, pushing against mounting fears regarding mass technological unemployment.
Responding to the huge wave of concern that has overtaken public discourse recently, Bezos didn’t say that there was no reason to worry — on the contrary, he suggest that rather than making people redundant, AI will unlock new industries and ultimately increase demand for human labor to the point of creating labor shortages by removing existing constraints on economic activity.
Jeff Bezos, of course, is not a neutral observer. Leaving aside his obvious financial interests, however, it is true that manufacturing companies in many developed countries already face labor shortages, at least from the perspective of an industrial entrepreneur.
Bezos’ prediction is somewhat plausible, assuming that his argument rests on a pattern that has appeared repeatedly throughout economic history: new technologies often destroy specific tasks while ultimately creating more demand and expanding industries. For instance — ATMs reduced the need for tellers to spend their days dispensing cash, but they lowered the cost of operating bank branches, which allowed banks to open more branches and employ tellers in different capacities such as customer service and sales.
Similarly, spreadsheets did not eliminate accountants, but rather increased the amount of financial work businesses could perform and created demand for more sophisticated forms of analysis. Historically, many technologies that were initially feared as job destroyers eventually contributed to rising employment and living standards.
However, an important caveat follows: AI differs from many previous technologies because it is not limited to automating physical labor or narrowly defined repetitive tasks, instead increasingly performing cognitive work that was once thought to be uniquely human. If AI continues advancing, then the speed at which existing jobs disappear could exceed the speed at which new ones are created, leading to a human labor surplus, exactly as feared. As a result, for Jeff Bezos to be entirely right, AI would need not only to increase productivity but also to unlock entirely new domains of economic activity.
This still does not solve the problem, as pointed out by former British PM Rishi Sunak, that labor shortages are real for entry level applicants — particularly those who must build their careers during the midst of a radical adjustment period. AI, as we know it of yet, allows a much smaller number of juniors to support a larger number of experienced workers.
In that sense, the central weakness in Bezos’s argument is not that it is impossible. It is that it assumes demand for human labor will expand at roughly the same pace as AI capabilities. That has happened with some previous technologies, but it has not happened with all of them, and there is no guarantee it will happen here.
