'Traditional Jobs May Fade By 2030': Sam Altman Hints At Job Market Shift

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted a major shift in the job market by 2030. He said that traditional roles may disappear as AI continues to evolve.

AI will create many new jobs and improve existing ones in the near future, but will also make some jobs even more unnecessary, he said in his blog.

He acknowledged the challenges posed by job displacement but also believed that this would make the world significantly wealthier with new opportunities and innovative ways of carrying out tasks.

"The shift won't happen overnight," he said in a blog post. "But when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big."

Altman said that humans will continue to find a purpose and value in new forms of work even if they appear unconventional today. He compared that a farmer from a century ago might view modern jobs such as graphic designers or software developers as "fake" because they don't involve doing hard manual work.

"To them, it might look like we are just playing games to entertain ourselves since we have plenty of food and unimaginable luxuries," he added. He mentioned that these jobs are meaningful and valuable to people today. Similarly, the AI advancement in the job sector and transformation of the professions would likely be true and meaningful for future generations.

Even though these changes will have a huge impact on society, Altman explained that people will still find new kinds of work and new ways to stand out or succeed. "Those jobs may not look very much like the jobs of today," he said.

"I hope we will look at the jobs a thousand years in the future and think they are very fake jobs, and I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them," he said.

By 2035, we might transition from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonisation the next year, or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the year after, he added.

But the advancement of AI, Altman said, doesn't mean human work will become obsolete. He highlighted a key human advantage over machines, which is the ability to care for others.