As workers worry about AI, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI is “creating a huge number of jobs”

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

Several different topics were covered during the talk, but one central topic that came up again was the current economic anxiety surrounding the AI ​​industry and whether it was something Americans should legitimately be concerned about. At one point, Quick noted, “This is happening very quickly. Is there a greater dislocation than we’ve seen in the past leading to greater inequality? And what do we do about it?”

Throughout the night, Huang struck an optimistic note. “AI creates jobs,” Huang said during the debate, adding that “AI is [the] “America’s best chance to reindustrialize.” Huang noted that the AI ​​industry is driven by a new generation of industrial factories, the kind that produce 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, just like the rest of the burgeoning AI industry.

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

Related to this, Huang criticized people who claim that AI will dominate humanity or wipe out huge sectors of the economy. “My biggest concern is that we scare… people, all the people we tell these science fiction stories to, to the point where AI is so unpopular in America, or people are so afraid of it, that they don’t really engage with it,” he said.

Ironically, much of the fatalistic rhetoric has been generated by the AI ​​industry itselfand critics maintain that such hyperbole has been used as a marketing gimmick designed to generate buzz and enthusiasm for products that are nowhere near the capabilities such rhetoric suggests.

It remains to be seen what kind of long-term impact AI will have on the broader economy. That said, reputable financial and academic organizations have suggested that, as as much as 15% percent of jobs in the US will be phased out in the coming years as a result of AI.