Jeff Bezos says utopia is right around the corner; we should just keep pushing and, importantly, keep funding companies like the ones he runs. In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin didn’t deny that artificial intelligence will be disruptive; he just happens to think that it’ll be in a way that creates endless abundance. Easy for a guy who already has infinite wealth to say. “If 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,” Bezos told CNBC anchor and New York Times columnist Aaron Ross Sorkin. “What’s really going to happen is we are going to have so much productivity in our economy,” he said, insisting that rather than replacing human workers, AI will “elevate all of these people.” Just how much will it elevate them? So much so that there’s going to be job shortages and deflation—not because the economy is going to tank now that we’ve so thoroughly hitched our wagons to a technology that has yet to produce much meaningful productivity improvements, but because people will just willingly quit their jobs and enjoy their labor-free life.
“A lot of people who have two-earner income households, one of those people are going to drop out of the workforce,” Bezos said. “I predict we will actually have deflation, assuming we let this technology play out and don’t hamstring it with regulation too early. Everything, food will get cheaper, housing construction will get cheaper.”
