Jeff Bezos： AI productivity gains could lead to labor shortages and deflation

I mentioned my optimism a minute ago and we should definitely talk about that because I think there's so many people who are afraid that AI is going to take their job. I think that there's going to be a labor shortage as a result. So let's go there then. I wanted to stay in space but let's go to that. We can come back, we can be in space too, whatever you want. No, but that's fascinating because I don't know if you saw Eric Schmidt gave a commencement address over the weekend and the students were booing because every time he mentioned AI they were booing because I think they're deeply fearful and worried about whether they're going to have a job. Yeah well and the reason they're afraid of that is because all these smart people keep saying that. So there are so many smart people and they aren't smart and they are saying oh my god you know there's going to be no more radiologists because you know AI can read x-rays better than a radiologist can and there are going to be no more software engineers because AI can program better than a software engineer can. These people are wrong. So what's really going to happen is that it's going to elevate all of these people and they're going to it's like it's like you've been digging let's say you're a software engineer right what it's the analogy I can give you is you've been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel and somebody's about to hand you a bulldozer. You should be so happy if you're digging the basement to your house and somebody says hey how about this I have a tool here that's going to and there what's really going to happen is we're going to have so much productivity in our economy that for example this is just one effect a lot of people who have two earner income households right one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce that's why we're going to have a labor shortage. People because of the productivity gains you're going to be able to afford things we're going to have I predict we'll actually have deflation of certain core assuming we let this technology play out and don't you know hamstring it with regulation too early we will actually have you know everything will get your food will get cheaper and housing construction will get cheaper and so is there a transition cost we can even solve the permitting problem I was talking about earlier for housing like it should take when you if you are a builder why does it take you six months nine months two years five years depending on what municipality you live in to get a building permit like hey I should do that in 10 seconds and it's not and it should give you a yes or no in 10 seconds and then you should have your authority to build it by the way if it says no it should give you the six reasons why and then you go change those things and resubmit but you start building tomorrow instead of two years from now but how do you answer I mean Amazon's laid a whole bunch of people off you heard uh Mark Zuckerberg because of AI Mark Zuckerberg recently laid a bunch of people off is that because of AI Jack Dorsey has George Dorsey ascribes it directly to AI well you'd have to talk to Jack about that I don't know but he must have had a lot of extra people the reason we're not seeing those same kinds of things but the reason that people are talking about this is in the context of coding right now and also in the context that for these companies have the extraordinary valuation I think that we're talking about they have to create extraordinary productivity look can I give you a different lens to view this so if I'm a software engineer I need to up level and think to myself what's my what am I really doing what is a software what we really do is we identify problems and we help solve them and and and the code is almost just uh it's a piece of execution that helps with that right but the real job is going to be identifying problems and helping to solve them does that make sense totally and that's not going to go away because it's going to that's the kind of thing that humans are going to be good at is figuring out oh okay we want this and they're going to work with that tool to build the system but we humans are never going to run out of problems and we're never going to run out of the need for solutions and it's just that the work is going to be done at a higher level it's going to be done with a bulldozer instead of a shovel and that's going to be a good thing