Chapter 11: Is AI creating more jobs than it destroys?

Let's continue on the theme — let's continue on the theme of the economy. Uh, so one of the concerns driving a lot of fear, at least in the US, probably around the world, is the concept that AI is destroying jobs. So 6 months ago we've said that the data looked murky, and over the last — through the last few months, you know, the data has come out very pro job creation, and I want to get this story out to people, you know, so that you can remain optimistic and we can quell the fear. It's one of the missions of our podcast here at Moonshots.

So this week once again, emerging labor market data suggests that technology is a net job creator in the US. Roughly 1 million professional positions are now classified as AI jobs, while LinkedIn estimated that 640,000 AI-specific jobs were created between 2023 and 2025. The boom is also generating employment far beyond just software AI jobs. Roughly $500 billion in additional annual spending on chips, servers, data centers, cooling and power infrastructure is supporting the demand for electricians, HVAC specialists and technicians. While even those occupations previously expected to face AI disruption, including paralegals and market research analysts, have continued to grow despite the fears. Like Eric Schmidt recently said, AI-exposed jobs are growing faster and paying better.

Bottom line, if you're watching and are concerned about your job or concerned about getting a job, your number one focus should be getting AI literate, learning the tools, making yourself prepared for an AI-dominated future.

You know, Salim, a couple episodes [ago] you shared on the pod the data around the majority of adding jobs as a result of AI. Your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I mean, two episodes ago — six — we [had] the data from Principal Financial Group. Uh, they have 100-plus thousand small businesses as clients. 60-plus percent were adding jobs because of AI and 1% — 1.4% — were losing jobs because of AI. So that's just an overwhelming thing.

David Sacks talks about this all on the All-In podcast all the time, that the job is a huge misnomer, right? And you have to kind of get rid of that and ignore that for a while, because this transition is going to be uh huge. We — our negative goes straight to, oh my God, we're going to lose the work. But the really — thing — bigger picture is what happens to the future of work and how does that transform to be better, right?

When we've done — there's a bunch of studies that show something like 74% of work in big companies is coordination work, and now you can get rid of all of that. Erik Brynjolfsson calls this white collar drudgery. You can get rid of that. Work on — let AI handle a lot of the crap stuff, that copying and pasting sales figures from one report, one system into another. And then work on where your judgment and experience make the biggest uh difference in the work and for the company and for the organization uh you're going to work. People worry about trying to work around policy around this — figure out how you maximize human agency as we go through this crazy transition. And human agency is exploding because of AI.

Dave, what are you seeing [in] all your companies? I mean, you're chair and on the board and founder of so many companies. Growing, hiring?

Yeah, I mean I think hiring, and I want to be really careful to say, you know, you have a million AI-related jobs and rising, but within that there's a lot of co-pilot type jobs where you're basically twice as efficient as you were using a co-pilot. But there's another subset that are using 10, 100 and soon a thousand agents and managing them as if they were employees. That's where you want to be. You want to try and get to that group as quickly as you can, because, you know, just using a co-pilot — you know, the bar is rising fast. That's not good enough. You need to move on and manage swarms.

And uh, interestingly, I met my first hire who does all of his work through voice. So he's managing, you know, agents — many agents. He's not using a QWERTY keyboard.

Alex, he has — this is a young guy at 20 — really transcended history there. So much for his —

But I really think, you know, you mentioned Erik Brynjolfsson, white collar drudgery. A lot of that stems from being in a chair for many — two hours. It's bad for your back, looking at a screen, going blind. That's all going to move over to standing up, moving your hands around, à la Minority Report, and controlling the agents in a much more dynamic environment. I think it's a much, much happier place for humans to exist. It's very much like Iron Man. You're Robert Downey Jr. and you're just building together with your Jarvis. That's actually where we're really going in the next year. And so the amount of awesomeness in that job function is just incomprehensible.

Yeah. The amount of work I do with Skippy while I'm driving and just having a conversation — say, do this work, write this report, get me the answer. It's incredible, right? Every moment — crap — every moment becomes capable.

Go back to the automation days, right? One concrete mixing truck replaces about a hundred workers with shovels shoveling concrete. Okay? Nobody wants to go back to shoveling concrete. Like, what are we thinking about? Just let's move forward, please.

Yeah. You know, the other thing that's really clear to me is that we were predicting massive white collar job disruption just a year ago. The choice to not do that was an active choice by the big AI labs under pressure from the White House, and also in China, you know, lawsuits — if you just wantonly fire people you have to actually try to retrain them to become an AI person and you have to pay either way. So the governments got involved and said we don't want massive voter disruption. The AI companies are saying it just doesn't matter that much. We're on this abundance curve that's so steep that working within AI to create new drugs, to create new physics, to create new math is so much more important than disrupting everyone's life, that we're just going to do it the easy way and do it with the cooperation of the White House. And so I think that's what's actually happened and likely to continue. So, as long as you're part of that rising wave and you're not, you know, sitting in legacy land, you're going to do really, really, really well and there isn't going to be massive job disruption.

Emad, you wrote a bestseller, The Last Economy. What do you make of the future of jobs here?

I think it's like the turkey before Thanksgiving. Um, getting plumper — you're adding the jobs, but the models have reached that level of capability now that you can replicate a whole digital workforce in a year, and then physically it'll come after. I don't think it will create jobs fast enough, but we can create abundance.

So I put forward a Champion proposal last week: dollar pre-money, everyone, all the kids own the equity of the robots and other things. But I think we can do one better. I think the government should have a massive infrastructure program and it should look to build a 100 million robots in America and they should be owned by the people. And I think that is how you get abundance. Like, again, if you want to have an end purchaser, make them owned by the people. Have that as this massive infrastructure buildout, because that will upgrade all of America's infrastructure. And I think that's where we have to go.

Elon said at the G20 last week, a robot can do the work of five humans. This is true. Like, factually, we know where it's going. So, I think that we have options of where to go.

In the meantime, we have to get ahead of things. There are jobs that will get crazy. Like, HVAC specialist is the one that I think — you're seeing electricians already earning $600,000 a year working in data centers. But there's just not enough humans, right? I think the government also in America, where it's going currently, will push back against robots. Um, and so electricians, HVAC — like, there's — you'll be surprised, especially in Europe, actually. It's so hot here that HVAC rollouts will do so well.

That's a really, really important point. I think, um, Andrew Yang actually, I think, was saying the same thing, that we're going to see this huge resurgence of trades. But I think a lot of people have been trained since, you know, a young age that a good white collar job manipulating a spreadsheet is a far greater ambition than being the best HVAC specialist in the world. And so they kind of demean the blue collar world. But the white collar job is the one that's going to become irrelevant.

And so a really good life plan is to become incredibly great at helping building data centers, cooling systems, liquid cooling, and then reinvest that money into AI companies that are riding the wave. Just as a life plan, it's a much, much better plan than aspiring to get a degree in accounting right now.

So look, like, it is inevitable that there's going to be the biggest infrastructure buildout of all time, not just in data centers, but again across America, across Europe. Our infrastructure is crumbling and governments will go there. So position yourselves there — if you're not using a thousand agents — and you will get the biggest tailwind of all time.

Alex, your thoughts, please.

Yeah, well, a couple thoughts. One, I'll take the position — I don't actually think it is advisable, at least in America, for the government to be owning 100 million robots.

I think that — you say the people, not the government.

Okay. But how do the people own 100 million robots through presumably some form of centralized government, which again, to my maybe overly American ear, smells like — uh, wait for it — like luxury automated communism, which is, I think, what the subtext would be. I'm not in favor of that. I would like to see every American owning a thousand robots. I don't think they necessarily need to be socialized or communally owned.

But I do think — I mean, every profession as currently construed right now I think is cooked. Uh, and I think the sequencing of the cooking is what determines social policy. So maybe it is the case that certain white collar professions right now can be automated earlier, more of a paradox style, than say quote unquote blue collar professions, HVAC engineering and the like. But HVAC engineering — let's not kid ourselves — HVAC engineering in the next few years with humanoid robots is just as cooked as spreadsheet management and accounting. It's just a matter of sequencing.

So I think, one, I think it's essential to distinguish between what passes for at this point the short term and the long term. In the short term, yes, I agree with the premise that there is some remaining alpha in the trades, so-called. But in the long term, no, the trades are just as automated and automatable as white collar so-called labor.

That's why I think they'll slow down the robots. But I think, again, the robots are the long term, and as I said, the government doesn't need to own them. Sovereign wealth funds are my Champion idea, or just the government can underwrite the robots that the people can own. I think the main thing is you have to get the ownership of the robots to the people somehow.

I think the sequencing is really important that Alex was referring to, too. But if Elon Musk calls and says, we're willing to pay up to $600,000 for the best electricians and plumbers to show up in Tennessee to build Colossus, and the job is only there for one or two years and then it's automated — take the job, take the money, stay nimble, and then the next opportunity will open up, and you'll know a bunch of people that are in the same boat in the middle of the AI revolution. And so then the sequence will evolve and we'll keep on the podcast telling you where to move next. But don't take it as a sign of, well, because that's cooked two years from now I'm going to do nothing tomorrow. Don't do that. Take the job. Build the data center.

I agree. And maybe just to underline, Dave, your point further — I think — so I'm always coining neologisms, uh, including moation, m-o-a-t-i-o-n, which is this notion that there are no stationary moats in a singularity, but what there are, are dynamical moats, temporary moats, if you will. And if you sequence them appropriately, then one moat can lead to another can lead to another and you achieve a dynamical moat. So same idea with professions: maybe an HVAC engineering position now enables — and this is not investment advice or career advice — but hypothetically, maybe an HVAC engineering position now creates enough of a capital base that can then be grown and translated to something else in 2 years that can then be translated to something else, dot dot dot, eventually you get to, I don't know, owning a planet.

So Salim, uh, let's take the conversation one step further, which is what happens when you don't have to work? What happens when all of your basic needs — food, water, energy, healthcare, education, liberty — all of that is enabled for you, right? You and I have discussed this before, going back to the Medici family and the Renaissance and so forth, where you basically have the life — and I've written on Substack about this — where you have the life of a gazillionaire, you don't need to work. What do you do?

Right. Um, I think that's an important realization, because when we get to the point where everything is cooked, that's also the point at which we have massive abundance, where all of your needs are taken care of for you. And now the question is, what do you want to do? You know, most people in the world are working because they have to put food on the table. They have to get insurance for their family. It's not what they dreamed of doing when they were a kid, right? So, it unleashes massive possibility at that point.

Salim, I think there's two categories here. Category one is the material needs, right? When you get to that level and you — it'll take a transition to stop thinking about meeting daily needs, right? Uh, like half the country in the US can't put $500 together in an emergency. Okay, that itself is an emergency. Um, and you've got such a monster structural problem around that that has to be addressed.

Now, at some point pretty quickly — let's use the simplest argument — that somebody goes deep with AI, figures out how to use it to do an active trading hedge fund strategy, starts making enough money to pay for themselves, pay for their families, etc., etc., right? And overall, in the aggregate, people will figure out and society will figure out how to generate huge amounts of wealth with this, and then you have the distribution question of how do you equitably share it, when we've studied that. But that's all the material covering day-to-day life stuff, covers the bottom two, three layers of Maslow's hierarchy.

Uh, and we could see that happening. And when you see societies getting to this abundance level, like the Mongols taking over India or the Mongols taking over uh East Asia, or the Romans taking over — the Medici family or whatever — you've heard us talk about the idea that people end up doing four activities: uh, food, art, music and sex. And the joke is not in that order, right?

Um, once you get past that and get through that, the really interesting next dimension opens up, and you start thinking about what problems could I tackle, because we're not going to run out of problems. We're just going to be able to tackle bigger and bigger problems, right? How do we create Alex's Dyson swarm? Uh, how do we go into the stars? How do we uh kind of think about the new different types of physics that may emerge from all of this? That's where the really fascinating stuff comes along.

And you know, I think this is the area, Peter — we've had this conversation at the XPRIZE board meetings — of could we design prizes that advance humanity radically, rather than just trying to solve the problems, because those look like they'll get handled? And what's that next phase look like? I think the opportunity for human flourishing in that is so magnificent.

We love problems and we love solving problems. We'll just have bigger and bigger problems which we'll be able to solve with bigger and bigger suites of AI agents and robots.