Andrew Ng, the co-founder of Google Brain, is calling BS on the idea that AI is coming for everyone's job. In a post today, he argued that the widespread panic over AI-driven unemployment doesn't just lack evidence — it's actively being amplified by players in the tech industry who stand to profit.
https://twitter.com/AndrewYNg/status/2054236506756370865
Take software engineering, the field supposedly most at risk from AI coding assistants. Ng points out that hiring in the sector remains strong, and the overall U.S. unemployment rate is a healthy 4.3%. His prediction? A "AI jobapalooza" that creates more roles than it eliminates.
Ng doesn't hold back in naming the culprits behind the fearmongering. First up: frontier AI labs. By painting a sci-fi picture of machines taking over, they make their own technology seem more powerful and inevitable. Then there are AI software companies. Traditional SaaS products charge $100 to $1,000 per user per year. But if you rebrand that product as a tool that can replace a $100,000-a-year employee, suddenly customers are happy to pay $10,000 — and it still looks like a bargain.
Finally, big corporations. Framing layoffs as "efficiency gains from AI" makes management look forward-thinking to investors. It's a lot more respectable than admitting, "We over-hired during the zero-interest-rate era and now we have to clean up the mess."
Ng acknowledges that AI is changing how work gets done. But conflating that with a collapsing labor market? That's a completely different story.