While the rest of the world is plausibly concerned about AI’s negative impact on the job market, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that it will not cause a “jobs apocalypse.” On May 26, he spoke virtually at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney (via Reuters).
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes AI won’t take away jobs
During his virtual appearance at the conference, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he realised that while AI is becoming a huge part of many jobs and industries, the “human part” of employment was irreplaceable. He claimed that he had been using AI to reply to Slack messages and emails. However, he replied to some of them himself.
Altman explained, “I had it reply to messages, saying ‘this is Sam’s AI,’ and it was an amazing example to me of we really do care about people. We really do care about our interactions with people, and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon.”
This realisation has led Altman to believe that the human interaction required in many jobs would remain irreplaceable. “It really, in both positive and negative ways, updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about.”
Elsewhere, he said that he was glad that AI’s impact on global employment levels was not as drastic as he had expected. “I’m delighted to be wrong about this. I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” he shared. “I now think I understand more about why it hasn’t, and I’m obviously grateful, but that is an area where my intuitions were just off.”
Originally reported by Ankita Shaw on Mandatory.
