OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday dismissed all fears about an upcoming global job apocalypse arising from artificial intelligence.
Speaking at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney, Altman said he was initially concerned about the impending effects of AI on labor markets and global employment levels, but the technology had not claimed as many white-collar jobs as he had feared.
“I’m glad to be wrong about this, I thought the elimination of entry-level white-collar jobs by now would have had a much greater impact than it actually has,” Altman told CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn in an interview.
“Now I think I understand more about why it didn’t happen, and I’m obviously grateful but it’s an area where my intuition was just off.”
According to Altman, in terms of “the human part of employment”, AI is unable to replace human touch and interaction.
“We really care about our interactions with people and this thing, which takes up a huge amount of my time, is not something I could ever imagine outsourcing to AI.”
“In fact, in both positive and negative ways, it leads me to think that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we think,” he said.
“I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of annihilation of jobs that some of our space sector companies are advocating or talking about.”
Altman’s comments come amid growing concerns over AI-fueled mass layoffs. Various companies like Amazon, Standard Charter, CBA and HSBC have announced job cuts and replaced those roles with AI.
“There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor on a very large scale,” the Anthropic co-founder said on Monday. If that happens, supporting displaced people will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.
Similarly, earlier this week, Meta decided to lay off 8,000 employees, taking a big step towards adopting AI tools for better efficiency and productivity.
