'We'll Find New Things To Do': OpenAI's Sam Altman On AI's Impact On Jobs

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that although artificial intelligence will bring about changes in jobs, society will adjust to it. He said that the Industrial Revolution triggered similar fears, but the predictions about future jobs were often wrong.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Altman said, "I think there will be a lot of jobs. Every technological revolution has panicked about jobs going away, and every technological revolution has found new jobs on the other side."

Since the gravity of job anxiety in India is higher because there are 500 million people under the age of 30, Altman said that when he meets political leaders, the topic of conversation centres around jobs, infrastructure, fair distribution of benefits, and safety.

He said that the job circumstances are difficult to predict, but the skills that will matter are fluency with AI tools, resilience and adaptability. He also said, "Figuring out what people are going to want and how to be useful to them, how to work with other people, these are all very good things to learn."

Altman added that although the changes brought by AI will be huge, "We'll find all sorts of new things to do".

The IT industry in India is a massive driver of the economy, contributing about 8 per cent of the GDP. On the disruption in jobs that AI is bringing about in the IT service sector, Altman said that there will still be a need for IT "broadly".

"What I expect to happen, as has happened with every other step forward in computer programming, is people will operate at a higher level of abstraction," he said. Altman added, "The amount of product and code that's produced will increase a lot."

Last year in September, Altman claimed that AI could replace 40 per cent of the jobs. 

"In 30 years, jobs change all the time. If you think about the jobs we did three decades ago, many of them may no longer exist today or new jobs that were kind of difficult to imagine years ago are now commonplace today."