For two years, the people building AI told us it was coming for our jobs. This month, the same people started saying it will create them.
Speaking in Paris, Jeff Bezos said AI would cause “a labour shortage”, not mass unemployment, and would unlock almost endless demand for builders and entrepreneurs. Days earlier, Sam Altman said he was “delighted to be wrong” about one of his biggest fears: that AI would rapidly wipe out white-collar work.
As Gizmodo neatly put it, the chief executives have stopped publicly threatening to replace us.
The script has flipped
This is a sharp turn. Not long ago, Altman warned that “whole categories of jobs” would disappear. Other bosses raced to outdo each other on how much of the workforce their models would soon make redundant, even as graduates walked into the worst entry-level market in years. Now the mood music is all opportunity and human-AI partnership.
