Amid the flood of AI doomerism, from Pope Leo XIV's Monday warning that AI and the digital transformation of the economy could unleash "new forms of slavery" and mass job losses, to Bernie Sanders and unhinged socialists calling for a halt to data centers buildouts, a move that would conveniently cede compute power to communists in Beijing, a growing and emerging chorus of dystopian futurists is now trying to frame the AI boom as an existential labor-market crisis rather than the next productivity supercycle that arrives just in time as a demographic winter unfolds.
Adding to recent comments from Netscape co-founder and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) co-founder Marc Andreessen, who argued that AI-related job-loss fears are merely hysteria and that AI is actually arriving at the moment the nation needs it most:
"We're going to have AI and robots precisely when we actually need them [with populations shrinking] to keep the economy from actually shrinking."
...none other than Goldman Sachs CEO and occasional weekend DJ in the Hamptons, David Solomon, penned a recent opinion piece in The New York Times asserting that the AI-related "job apocalypse and mass unemployment ahead" hysteria is "overblown."
"I'm the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs. The A.I. Job Apocalypse Is Overblown," Solomon titled the NYTimes op-ed, likely aiming for maximum media exposure with such an eye-catching headline.
Solomon's framing of the headline appears to be a direct response to growing resistance not only to AI chatbots but also to data centers nationwide, a backlash wave we pointed out many months ago as alarm bells ring loudly from the tech bro community. As AI infrastructure becomes the backbone of the next economic cycle, the anti-data-center movement is quickly gaining steam and becoming a political weapon by the doomerism community.
Solomon argues that AI will not eliminate jobs at an apocalyptic scale. Instead, he says it will allow workers to become more productive, shift to higher-value tasks, and create new roles focused on managing, implementing, validating, and regulating AI systems.
However, Solomon does acknowledge that there will be labor market disruptions:
Absolutely. This transition, like other significant moments in our history, will entail new challenges, especially as A.I. separates labor from productivity in magnitudes we haven't seen before.
He pointed out that the U.S. economy has seen this story before: it has repeatedly absorbed technological shocks, from electrification to automobiles to computers, while overall employment and living standards continued to rise.
Solomon said AI will likely follow the same pattern as previous technological shifts, eliminating some jobs while expanding others, such as the explosion in construction jobs tied to the $700 billion in capex that hyperscalers are set to deploy this year alone.
Solomon cites his economists, who recently forecast that AI could automate 25% of current work hours over the next decade, with white-collar sectors such as banking, law, accounting, software, and customer service most exposed.
Solomon said that if AI destroys jobs at an unprecedented scale, there should be a "joint effort" between the corporate world and government to help workers and institutions adapt to the new labor market.
"The U.S. economy can and will adapt to major advances in technology," he emphasized.
Solomon's comments were similar to those made earlier this year by venture capital guru Andreessen, who argued that fears of an AI-driven jobs apocalypse are overstated.
In his view, automation and robots are entering the picture at exactly the moment economies need them to offset labor shortages and prevent stagnation.
Read:
Elon Musk has been among the loudest and most vocal voices warning about the demographic winter consuming not only the Western world but many other countries as well. He has framed his Optimus robot as "great for Japan" because it could help offset a shrinking workforce.