Contrary to popular opinion, Groq CEO Jonathan Ross believes AI will create more jobs than we can handle. Ross said that the rapid technological advancement in AI could be another case of Jevons Paradox working its magic. 

“We keep thinking of each technology as displacing work. One of the things that’s probably going to happen is we will create more jobs for people than we have people,” Ross said, predicting that suddenly there may be a lack of people to do things. 

Citing the surge in the use of visual graphics in news articles, he said it has become easier than ever to do so as “most people spend more hours in generating graphics”, hinting at using AI more – and not less – expanding its uses far beyond what was originally intended. 

He said this, pointing at the Jevons Paradox, which was first reported in the 1860s by English economist William Jevons in his book The Coal Question. 

As steam engines became more efficient, people did not use less coal; instead, they used more of it. This increase in coal utilisation occurred because the more efficient steam engines lowered operational costs, enabling a widespread and intensive use of the engines. 

But is it the same?

Ross believes that something similar is happening now. AI advancements are not only making it easier to perform tasks but also reducing costs, resulting in more people using them across sectors and creating more jobs in the process. 

“What will probably happen is with most of the things that generative AI makes easy, you will actually see an increase in human activity on that. There’s always going to be someone who’s going to be more entrepreneurial and figure out a way to monetise and get a whole bunch of people working on it,” Ross said.

After all, the World Economic Forum predicted that AI would not only replace 85 million jobs by 2025, but also create 97 million jobs at the same time.

In another report, the WEF listed the types of jobs that will be made obsolete, which included easily automatable jobs like bank tellers, data entry clerks and secretaries. Meanwhile, jobs for AI and machine learning specialists were some of the fastest-growing.

Depends on What You Mean by Automatable

While the study stated that jobs like clerks and secretaries were foremost at the risk of becoming obsolete, others held a different opinion.

In a recent episode of the Ben and Marc Show podcast, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz discussed how AI was more likely to take over the middle management at organisations. Thanks to the ease of training employees as well as a lack of interpersonal issues, the two reasoned that AI could take over managerial jobs rather than employee jobs.

Likewise, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that the shift towards AI usage in the workplace is occurring differently than expected. “In many cases, this is something that will change the way people do their jobs in the same way that mobile phones, the internet, and computers did,” he said.

Further, he said that the jobs that future generations would be doing would be different, but at the moment, the aim is to try and figure out how to adjust to the speed at which advancement is happening.

What is the solution? 

“The world just needs a lot more code than we have people to write right now,” declared Altman, saying, “You hear a coder say I’m like 2-3x times more productive,” rather than the other way around.

Similarly, as Ross stated, the generation of actual jobs will come from more people working in the field of AI and pioneering developments in the field. In doing so and creating their own companies, more people will be hired in the field, resulting in more jobs created.

This is already being seen, according to Stanford’s AI Index Report 2024, where the number of newly funded AI startups increased by 40.6% from 2022. As of 2023, according to the report, as many as 1,812 startups had been newly funded.

With this increase in startups, as well as developers aiming to upskill themselves, it’s likely that the end result will be lower-level workers following suit. This is also backed by the number of organisations, as mentioned in the Stanford report, increasingly making use of AI, regardless of whether the company itself is tech-inclined or not.

While it might not be realistic to expect most people to reskill themselves in accordance with the changing job market, becoming skilled with AI may not be as hard as one would expect.

Several universities have actually begun refining their AI and data science programmes. To the point that they have actually ranked on this year’s QS World Rankings.

Similarly, both universities and companies have begun offering their own free courses online, most of which go into the foundations of AI, machine learning and data science. But while this could help, it doesn’t fully resolve the problem of potential job loss or how we could start skilling for the influx of potential jobs created because of AI.

“The entire point of going into a different age and why you would call it a different technological age, is it breaks all of our intuitions,” said Ross.

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