AI will lead to labour shortages not unemployment, claims Jeff Bezos
The ex-Amazon CEO discussed his hopes for the future of AI amid the launch of his AI startup Prometheus
Jeff Bezos has claimed that AI will lead to labour shortages rather than job losses in an optimistic appearance at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Wednesday.
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Bezos made the comments while advocating for his new AI venture, which is aimed at speeding up the physical manufacturing process.
The former CEO for Amazon stepped down from the ecommerce site and appointed himself co-CEO of Project Prometheus last November.
"I know there's a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on," Bezos said.
"I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labour shortage."
More than a quarter of Brits say they fear losing jobs to AI, according to a survey by recruitment company Randstad published in January.
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The billionaire, who is the fourth-richest person in the world with a net worth of approximately $250 million, claimed that people have “endless” things to do and are being limited by obstacles he says AI would lower.
One of his focuses is on Blue Origin, his space enterprise, which he hopes to use to move polluting industries off Earth.
By partnering with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk and his venture SpaceX, Bezos hopes to complete the project using the trillionaire’s rockets.
"If space travel gets reliable enough and inexpensive enough, and we can get materials from asteroids and near-Earth objects and the moon, then this garden planet can be returned to its pre-Industrial Revolution state," Bezos said.
Bezos appeared at the technology conference in Paris with Blue Origin CEO David Limp, who announced that reconstruction for the firm’s launch pad for New Glenn rockets has begun in Florida following a shock explosion in May.
Musk also laid out a similarly lofty vision for space adventure before last week’s SpaceX IPO, including hopes to build entire civilisations on the moon and Mars.
Speaking to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, last week, Musk discussed sending AI data centres into space and having holidays on the moon.