As workers worry about AI, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI is ‘creating an enormous number of jobs’

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

A number of different topics were broached during the talk, but a central theme that kept coming back was the ongoing economic anxiety surrounding the AI industry and whether it was something Americans should be legitimately worried about. At one point Quick noted: “This is happening so quickly. Is there a bigger dislocation than we’ve seen in the past that leads to greater inequality? And what do we do about that?”

Throughout the night, Huang struck an optimistic note. “AI creates jobs,” Huang asserted during the discussion, adding that “AI is [the] United States’ best opportunity to re-industrialize” itself. Huang noted that the AI industry is powered by a new breed of industrial factories—the kinds producing the hardware that acts as critical infrastructure for the AI business. (Huang’s company notably sells a lot of that hardware.) Those factories necessarily need workers, as does the rest of the blossoming AI industry.

Just because a specific task is automated, that doesn’t mean that a person’s entire job is going to be replaced, Huang reasoned. People who believe this “misunderstand that the purpose of a job and the task of a job are related” but not ultimately the same thing, he said. In other words, Huang’s argument is that even when AI takes over a discrete task within a role, the broader function that employee serves in an organization is likely to remain.

Relatedly, Huang was critical of people who allege AI will dominate humanity or that it will wipe out huge sectors of the economy. “My greatest concern is that we scare…people—all the people that we’re telling these science fiction stories to, to the point where AI is so unpopular in the United States, or people are so afraid of it, that they don’t actually engage it,” he said.

Ironically, much of the “doomer” rhetoric has been generated by the AI industry itself, and critics maintain that such hyperbole has been used as a marketing gimmick designed to gin up buzz and excitement for products that aren’t anywhere near the capabilities that such rhetoric suggests.

It remains to be seen what kind of long-term impact will have on the overall economy. That said, reputable financial and academic organizations have suggested that as much as 15% percent of jobs in the U.S. will be eliminated over the next several years as a result of AI.