Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
AI

AI Will Lead To Labor Shortages, Bezos Says In Optimistic Talk (reuters.com) 96

Posted by BeauHD from the we'll-see-about-that dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Artificial Intelligence will 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."

Half of Americans fear the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, a Reuters/Ipsos poll 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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

AI Will Lead To Labor Shortages, Bezos Says In Optimistic Talk More

AI Will Lead To Labor Shortages, Bezos Says In Optimistic Talk

Comments Filter:

  • It's so hard to get a good domestic these days (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @02:11PM (#66197286)
    Ever since Jervey, Waring, & White shut down.

  • AI will Lead to a Labor Shortage? (Score:3)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @02:20PM (#66197300)
    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.

  • Hallucinated out of his ass (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vrallis ( 33290 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @02:28PM (#66197312) Homepage

    I think Bezos hallucinated this out of his ass...or at least "generatively created" it.

    • 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.
    • 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.

    • He's just repeating what Claude told him.

      Oh wait, excuse me...Alexa+.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Probably working on an army of murderbots to protect him from the guillotine.

  • Artificial Intelligence will lead to labour shortages, not the replacement of humans, [...] 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.

    Space exploration, which is *checks notes* much better done by automated systems less fragile than us meatbags. Space manufacturing, same. So he waves around an irrelevant distraction and we're supposed to suck on it? We're not that fucking stupid, Temu Lex Luther.

    • 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:2)

        by unrtst ( 777550 )

        I don't know what polluting industries Lex thinks he can move to space. Concrete production? Steel mills? Water intensive industries? ...

        Aren't the rockets themselves a big fuck you to the environment? Maybe if we send all the billionaires into space that'd get rid of a lot of polution?

        If/when we get a space elevator, or some other pipe dream, then *maybe* something? But we're all here, not in space. And in space, getting rid of heat is hard - AI data centers as satellites is a complete fiction. And the moon? That thing is WAAAAY far away. If we need somewhere cold with lots of water, we have a whole continent to use (Antarctica)! And it's S

    • 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)

    by belthize ( 990217 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @02:45PM (#66197338)

    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)

    by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @02:53PM (#66197354)

    ...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.

    • 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
      • Holy shit man. There were fucking overseers and foremen in ancient egypt:

        "So far, the dig has revealed 50 tombs of foremen, workmen and their kin. Each is different, like none previously seen by Egyptologists. The labor force dates from the fourth dynasty, when the Pharaohs built the greatest Pyramids, until the sixth, 420 years later in 2150 BC."

        Relationships between worker and boss, unlike slave and master, were very close. Foremen had their crews buried beside them.

        https://archive.is/Sn0ZH#selec [archive.is]

  • Hard Disagree (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fatwilbur ( 1098563 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @03:08PM (#66197394)
    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.

    • 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: Hard Disagree (Score:4)

        by fatwilbur ( 1098563 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @05:00PM (#66197586)
        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 real education or aptitude. The problem with them being capable, is they were always smart enough to see it, and quickly refused to settle working with the rest and accepting same wages. They would (rightfully) demand the same pay as their NA counterparts, which required immigration.

        Unpopular opinion here though... I thought this outsourcing cycle was actually very beneficial and valuable. I went through many instances of it, and ended up consulting (even recommending!) "outsourcing" programs. I never lost a job to it (all I'll say is it seemed easy to shift what I did to be out of scope, as I would do with AI now). The ultimate problem was pushing through outsourcing before a company had an expertise on how to do it effectively and make it valuable.

        It was seen and often implemented as a resource replacement strategy for cost savings: replace expensive onshore coder/admin/etc. with cheap offshore coder/admin/etc. Every instance of doing that at every company ever failed miserably. What some of us figured out early, and most eventually, is that it is a spectacular workload replacement strategy. Most in-house IT staff are very skilled, and without doubt most of them had huge chunks of mindless and repetitive, low-value tasks on their plate. This was huge value creation for onshore people - I'd never outsource to an Indian company ever again, but every new organization I come to and find one of my Tier 2 NOC technicians spending half his day fixing server backup errors that I could actually train one of those Indians to do in a week? Yep, he's not doing that anymore. Shift that work to a junior, or soon enough, AI. You don't fire the tech, you get him to do things much more worthy of his skill and experience. So, I "outsource" regularly now by finding masses of work I can train anyone to do, and either contract it out cheap, hire a new in-house junior employee to train using it, or pretty soon, hand it to AI.
  • 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)

    by broward ( 416376 ) <browardhorne@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @03:38PM (#66197456) Homepage

    this comment will rival Gates' clueless comment that "The Internet Is A Fad".

    Bezos apparently has no grasp of history -

    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."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      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

      • I love how he started his quote with "Keynesian theory is right," stopping me from reading the rest of the quote.

    • 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

    • 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

  • 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 Conan [imdb.com]). Especially favored employees could ride a stationary bicycle-generator.

  • Bezos should be required to state how much income tax he pays before uttering anything.
  • 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

    • What new jobs will be created?
      That new job certainly won't be a human putting the stuffing in a new version of a teddy bear... the new version of a teddy bear will be robot sewn and stuffed. All the boss has to do is select what product to make from a tablet and the factory will switch over to the newly chosen item and make a hundred thousand for the dirty, starving, dirt-poor masses to buy at $15 each.

      (bing)
      "Labor shortages have reached historically high levels worldwide, with about 75% of employers strug

      • I was contrasting the propaganda of billionaires with the history of industrialization. The USA has long had a culture of billionaires having more rights and the press assists them by restricting the freedom to find the truth.

        In "The Jetsons", buildings were assembled by a giant robot: While some menial jobs were performed by robots, humans also did menial work by pushing buttons that controlled the robots. (Mr Jetson did that in a factory that made sprockets and gear-wheels.) That in turn, was a warn

  • remind me - I'm super curious and how this isn't indicative of AI eating peoples jobs.
  • Fuck your ifs based on asinine space coke hopes and dreams which will never pan out.

  • Orbital Factories are unlikely to employ very many human workers.

  • We could do that *now* if we wanted to. But it costs money. Costs reduce profits. And you don't get to be Jeff Bezos by doing anything that reduces your profits.

  • More people will lose jobs than gain !

  • AI will not lead to labor shortages. What is leading and will lead to labor shortages is low IQ people having more babies, high IQ people having fewer or no babies, and tons of low IQ immgrants, legal and illegal, all leading to inadequate numbers of people with the aptitude to do the jobs that are actually needed, including mechanics and HVAC techs.

    • What prevents a robot from turning a wrench and pulling out the old BEV battery and installing a new one?
      Why couldn't a robot install HVAC ducting the same way TBMs build tunnels?
      Roto-rooter could be replaced by little robots that crawl the sewer and slither into the sewer drain and chop up the tree roots.

      https://underthehardhat.org/ai... [underthehardhat.org]

Slashdot Top Deals

Why be a man when you can be a success? -- Bertolt Brecht

Close