AI will lead to labour shortages, Bezos says in optimistic talk

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PARIS -- Artificial Intelligence will lead to labour shortages, not the replacement of humans, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted in a highly optimistic appearance at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris on Wednesday.

Bezos put forward a rosy vision of how technology will help humanity, speaking about projects including his space venture Blue Origin and his new AI startup Prometheus, which is aimed at speeding up physical manufacturing.

“I know there’s a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on,” Bezos said. “I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labour shortage.”

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Half of Americans fear the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found this month.

Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest person with a net worth around US$250 billion, argued that people have “endless” things to do, and are currently limited by barriers that he said AI would lower.

One goal of space exploration is to move polluting industries off Earth, said Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to compete with trillionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX in rockets.

“If space travel gets reliable enough and inexpensive enough, and we can get materials from asteroids and near-Earth objects and the moon, then this garden planet can be returned to its pre-Industrial Revolution state,” Bezos said.

Appearing together with Bezos was Blue Origin CEO David Limp, who said reconstruction of the firm’s launch pad for New Glenn rockets has begun in Florida following a dramatic explosion in May.

Musk has also put forward a lofty vision for space ahead of last week’s SpaceX IPO, including plans to create cities on the moon and Mars. In an interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon last week, he talked about firing AI data centres into space and having vacations on the moon.

(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro, Toby Sterling and Louise Heavens; Editing by Peter Graff)