AI Will Lead To Labor Shortages, Bezos Says In Optimistic Talk (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0183944628
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/06/17/1711214/ai-will-lead-to-labor-shortages-bezos-says-in-optimistic-talk
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/ai-will-lead-labour-shortages-jeff-bezos-says-vivatech-2026-06-17/
> Artificial Intelligence will [1]lead to labour shortages, not the replacement of humans , Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted in a highly optimistic appearance at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris on Wednesday. Bezos put forward a rosy vision of how technology will help humanity, speaking about projects including his space venture Blue Origin and his new AI startup Prometheus, which is aimed at speeding up physical manufacturing. "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 labor shortage."
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> Half of Americans fear the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, a Reuters/Ipsos poll [2]found this month. Bezos, the world's fourth-richest person with a net worth around $250 billion, argued that people have "endless" things to do, and are currently limited by barriers that he said AI would lower. One goal of space exploration is to move polluting industries off Earth, said Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to compete with trillionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX in 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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/ai-will-lead-labour-shortages-jeff-bezos-says-vivatech-2026-06-17/
[2] https://memeburn.com/half-of-americans-now-fear-ai-could-take-a-job-in-their-household/
It's so hard to get a good domestic these days (Score:5, Informative)
Ever since Jervey, Waring, & White shut down.
AI will Lead to a Labor Shortage? (Score:2)
Yea maybe, considering there is no I(intelligence) in today's AI they will need a lot of puppet masters to keep the illusion going.
The real question is, where are all these capable and intelligent individuals(the puppet masters) going to come from with this false AI taking over education by design and via cheating.
Many individuals using today's AI might end up dumber and less capable of doing much of anything.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, it's got electrolytes.
Hallucinated out of his ass (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Bezos hallucinated this out of his ass...or at least "generatively created" it.
Re: (Score:2)
Most likely. Billionaires' filter bubbles are completely divorced from the facts and from the realities of ordinary people. They live in ivory towers and no one will dare challenge their wacky ideas and bullshit.
It's also a convenient position to espouse in the face of widespread job destruction using AI as an excuse to suppress wages / increase the desperation of ordinary people so they'll work for less.
Re: Hallucinated out of his ass (Score:2)
Tragedy of the Commons. Purely selfish endeavor leads to a systemic failure for everyone
Re: Hallucinated out of his ass (Score:1)
Is that why Linux isn't on the desktop?
Re: (Score:2)
He's not hallucinating he's lying. There is a difference.
You can be forgiven for mistaking the two given the sheer brazenness of the lie.
Re: (Score:2)
LOL Temu Lex Luther (Luthor?)
That's gold.
I don't know what polluting industries Lex thinks he can move to space. Concrete production? Steel mills? Water intensive industries? What pollutes much more than manufacturing I think is things like short-lived consumer products with no re-usability that end up in the trash, in the oceans and waterways, etc.
Building spaceships in space out of space materials makes for good speculative science fiction. Space miners, space truckers, space stations where space truckers
Re: (Score:3)
There are no good or benign billionaires or trillionaires. They aren't monochromatically evil but they are biased to take much more than is reasonable that ultimately causes great, unnecessary pain, suffering, destruction, and desperation.
Optimism (Score:5, Funny)
Any time a billionaire effectively states the biggest problem facing the masses in the future is too much money I always feel very relieved.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
...I work in the R&D dept. in a F500 company. Today we had a meeting with our manager, and discussions were all about AI forthcoming applications in our company. The problem of unemployement caused by AI was raised by one od us, as we feared that somebody could be replaced. Our manager was instead very happy about AI, and she told us that now all her slides and reports are quickly prepared using Copilot AI. We - the employees - looked each other smiling...it was now clear who could be replaced by AI soon.
Managers don't get replaced (Score:2)
Because they're not there to make slides they're there to keep an eye on you. The position of manager was created when unions started to form specifically to act as an interface between the ownership class and well, you the working class and to make sure that the interests of the ownership class were protected.
There is a subclass of the working class that appear to be managers but are not. These are line workers who have been given the title of manager so that they can be forced to do some of the paperw
Hard Disagree (Score:3)
AI (LLMs) will result in a huge amount of job losses... in India. If you've ever worked with Accenture/TCS/Wipro/etc. resources and now an LLM in a programming context, it's hardly even comparable. Every single model now exceeds the capabilities of an outsourced programmer in terms of cost, speed, and quality. Once agents are perfected, and we can string their similarly sized and scoped actions together, exactly nothing stands in the way of starting to replace massive outsourcing contracts with AI systems. I can't even imagine that an offshore resource is already no more than a pass through of your organization's task to an LLM engine. The big outsourcers no doubt are looking to develop those systems and replace their workers with AI to maintain their contracts, but smart companies here will but them out.
It is truly amazing actually, even a bit funny and ironic, is that a valid way of looking at LLMs is: American IT staff have written a program that does the same tasks we shuffled offshore for decades, effectively making them redundant. The empire strikes back.
Re: Hard Disagree (Score:2)
I worked for Infosys and HCL. ChatGPT already exceeds native Indian ability and trustworthiness. Few Americans realize that Indians who come to US are heavily filtered and culturally indoctrinated. They represent the top 5% of Indian society. India will have huge problems soon.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, they are all the same. Mass hire bodies off the street to meet contract commitments, who were all clearly quickly trained on one very specific skill and thrown into the blender. A very true and typical example: replacing an in-house DB admin with someone who's never turned on a computer before but completed a one-week crash course in writing basic SQL queries. Turned out as expected. The top 5% you mention is about accurate, and those were the 1/20 who (by luck maybe?) turned out to have either some re
off world we know how that goes (Score:2)
from the companies that will bring you no workers rights , no health and safety and no oxygen if you complain.
The Internet is a fad (Score:5, Insightful)
this comment will rival Gates' clueless comment that "The Internet Is A Fad".
Bezos apparently has no grasp of history -
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
"Keynesian theory is right. The real cause of economic depressions is the mismatch between production time and consumption time which occurs gradually as productivity rises. Governments then create make-work jobs in a haphazard attempt to maintain consumption (equilibrium). Eventually, the impedance mismatch leads to collapse and a new system. We are probably on the verge of that change."
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/27/work-week/
Re: (Score:2)
Just so everyone knows, the link in this post is intended to promote the author's website for his personal benefit. Also, the quote provided is a quote of himself, not any special or interesting authority. More laughable is the absurd use of the word "impedance". Finally, the points made are ignorant of the concept of "rate" or what "productivity" even means. Productivity does not mean more "production time" and more "production time" doesn't mean more "consumption time" is needed. A whole lot of stupi
Re: (Score:2)
> this comment will rival Gates' clueless comment that "The Internet Is A Fad".
There's no credible, sourced record of Gates ever saying "the internet is a fad" or anything to that effect.
The historical record actually points strongly in the opposite direction.
In May 1995, Gates wrote an internal memo to Microsoft's executive staff titled "The Internet Tidal Wave," in which he described the internet as something that "changes the rules" and pushed his team to aggressively expand Microsoft's online presence.
That same year, he appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote Mic
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think so. This isn't a mistake this is a brazen lie to hide the plan they have to cause mass unemployment so that they can dismantle democracies before any of us realize what's happening and how fucked we are and try to vote ourselves food and shelter.
You don't even have to ask if that's the case, we have several public statements from AI CEOs and tech CEOs in general telling everyone to cool it with all the discussion of all the layoffs and unemployment.
They are getting ready to slaughter u
Need more humans (Score:2)
He needs more humans to spin the cranks on the electric generators to power the AI.
I envision an old school giant spindle being turned by men walking in a circle (ala [1]Conan [imdb.com]). Especially favored employees could ride a stationary bicycle-generator.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082198
How much does he pay? (Score:2)
Bezos should be required to state how much income tax he pays before uttering anything.
Billionaires bait-n-switch, again (Score:2)
Billionaires are spending, well, billions of dollars on AI because they assume AI will evolve into a machine that works. A machine that converts wages expense into capital they own.
A new technology increases the consumption of raw resources. Thus, money is spent mechanizing the gathering of those resources, usually at great environmental cost. As always, after the infrastructure is built, jobs disappear. Such as, 100 men with shovels and carts being replaced by 5 men with a 400t (capacity) dump-truck
Re: (Score:3)
The elites hate labor shortages. They love labor surpluses.
Re: (Score:3)
"Elites want labor shortages!", "No, Elites hate labor shortages!" ...
No, it's neither of those. It's money and power.
Labor shortages are only bad if you're the one being shorted. If you've got money and power, you have the available labor.
Labor surpluses can be bad if that frees up your trapped employees to go to greener pastures. If you have the green pasture, you win.
If Bezos is trying to sell us on this leading to a labor surplus, then either:
A) he's just speaking his opinions and doesn't care cause he'
Re: Correction (Score:1)
Why not both?
Re: (Score:2)
How does a labor shortage give them more control? When labor is in short supply it advantages the laborers as they can choose among competing employers who must offer higher wages or other forms of compensation to be able to hire that labor. A shortage of workers would lead to a loss of control.
Re: (Score:2)
OR better yet, we can organize and make capital our bitches! Sorry, I mean reduce class stratification between labor and capital.
Re: (Score:2)
You can do that whenever you want. You own your own labor and you can sell it to whomever you choose. You could even find other individuals and jointly form a collective singular entity (ie, incorporate) if you don't want to go it alone. If you're successful you could even hire other employees to work for your organization assuming they could use the company and don't want to similarly go it alone. Historically speaking the upsides of doing this are astronomical, but there is the chance it might not work ou
Re: Correction (Score:3)
a simplistic view. Tragedy of the Commons. Network systems are not libertarian.
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/27/work-week/
Re: Correction (Score:2)
You are assuming that a demand will exist for human labor or skill, and that there will always be a skill one can learn or physical labor one can provide,
In the age of robotics and ai as they are being presented, that is a false premise,
Any physical work that can be done by a human today can be done by a robot. If not, explain why,
Any knowledge work that can be done by a human can be done more quickly and potentially much cheaper by an AI.
Writing code? AI is faster and cheaper.
Structural calculation? Why no
Re: (Score:2)
Unless the cost to obtain labor crosses above the cost to automate the labor.
See: all the money being poured into AI.
Re: (Score:2)
Found the guy who flunked Econ.
Re: Correction (Score:2)
What he means is there will be shortages of complaint and low cost experts with specific skills that I cannot yet define
They will use that to fraudulently flood the country with cheap foreign visa labor while laying off hordes of American workers while screaming like stuck pigs about shortages