Tech Tonic: God complex is why AI chiefs can't see the humans they'll displace

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

'Every job will be affected. Some jobs will be lost, some jobs will be created. But every job will be affected. And immediately, it is unquestionable, you're not going to lose your job to an AI, but you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI,' Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the recent Milken Institute Global Conference. I respect Huang, as many of us do too, but with this one comment, he's joined the long line of ivory tower millionaires and billionaires who are trying to play God. Much like the rest of the Silicon Valley folks who love to be seen giving a quote, when pressed about what these new jobs (the ones we'll likely have to 'change to') might be, he didn't have a clue. I'm being brusque. He doesn't have a clue, and I've heard that before. Many times.
We're potentially hurtling toward a humanitarian catastrophe, and the levels of hallucination are astounding. Think about it—would you be reading this warning (and about this insincere lip service) if artificial intelligence (AI) had replaced this human? If I were to have AI write this for your reading pleasure, I'd expect to be summoned by my editor-in-chief and my executive editor, get roundly ticked off—and rightly so. Human perception, irrespective of the millions of dollars being thrown toward it, is not something artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence—irrespective of what you call it—will be able to replicate. I've said this before, and I'll say it again for every million the tech billionaires spend toward that perceived mission.
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Not everyone's in the same boat of delusion, and that is why there's newfound respect for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. At the company's first developer conference earlier this summer, he made two things very clear — AI usage could spike unemployment among entry-level jobs to as high as 20% in the next five years, and that AI companies as well as governments must stop 'sugar-coating' things. His hope, when he said this, was to jolt fellow AI companies and the government into preparing for and protecting the humans who work jobs for a living.
Mind you, Huang's comments came as he bristled at the exact warning Amodei expressed. Axios reported that Huang told them, 'I don't know why AI companies are trying to scare us. We should advance the technology safely just as we advance cars safely. ... But scaring people goes too far.' Fine, Amodei shouldn't scare people—we can sort of agree, for a moment, for the sake of it. What would you suggest? That is exactly where leaders such as Huang come up short. Very, very short. Ambiguous lines such as 'new jobs will be created' don't say anything, despite words being cobbled together into a semblance of a sentence.
I was once told by a tech executive that we must think of the coming of AI as the evolution of the car all those years ago, when everyone said the job of a horse carriage pilot would be eliminated. Wrong. Cars needed drivers to work. AI, with all its claimed super-intelligence, will go about in isolation. Even if it is wrong (which it will be most of the time), it'll be wrong with some level of confidence. Very Gen Z vibes, if I may take the liberty to infuriate another demographic.
Any and all comparison with perceived historical technological disruption is surely intellectually dishonest, at best. Take the Industrial Revolution, for example, which unfolded over decades, allowing generations of humans to adapt. Previous waves of automation primarily affected manual labor, alongside creating new opportunities for cognitive work. AI's very approach is different, since it targets precisely those knowledge-based jobs that were supposed to be resistant to machines taking over—from radiology to legal research, financial analysis, writing code, managing a company's tech infrastructure, or creating art.
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The Nvidia CEO's confidence stems from the fact that he's perched atop the AI revolution's most profitable enterprise — valued at around $4 trillion. 'AI agents are the new digital workforce,' he declared at CES 2025, seemingly oblivious to the irony of celebrating the replacement of human workers while preaching job creation. For Huang and his fellow tech titans, AI represents a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. For millions of workers and job roles, it represents an existential threat to their livelihoods.
Perhaps most galling is the tech industry's willful blindness to the speed of AI displacement versus job creation. LinkedIn's 2025 Work Change Report—make of it what you will—suggests that 70% of the skills used in most jobs could change by 2030. This isn't gradual evolution, but economic whiplash that transcends humans in numbers unimaginable. While Huang speaks airily of workers adapting and learning new skills, he ignores a very simple yet harsh reality: retraining takes months or years, but job losses usually happen overnight. An inward look at the happenings in Silicon Valley—if they bother to—will illustrate that.
OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman says the human workforce should take AI as 'friends.' Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke blessed the world with a long post on X in April to say, 'Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.' When Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, an online marketplace, says 'AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job too. This is a wake-up call,' she forgets that her financial reality and the financial reality of millions of families isn't at all the same.
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Tech companies and their leaders see business and money. They don't see humans. Unfortunately, we seem to have handed over the reins of any conversation about our futures to the same people. The future will be littered with economic and humanitarian catastrophes, whether AI succeeds or fails. If you think Silicon Valley cares—beyond their series of reassuring bromides—you're very wrong. As they say, Father Time makes no round trips.
Vishal Mathur is the Technology Editor at HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice versa. The views expressed are personal.