We Work In AI. We’ve Seen It Eliminate Jobs. We’ve Also Seen It Create More Jobs
Silicon Valley used to encourage one another to “move fast and break things.” Then we broke everything. And people started to get angry.
Every major tech change throughout history has caused painful disruption. Farm families are still suffering from the effects of the Industrial Revolution, which occurred more than a century ago. Absorbing each new technological onslaught has taken society a lot of time, but at least it also took a while for the innovations to fully infiltrate the economy. Not this time. The AI transition is being compressed into a few years.
People are logically panicked about their jobs being replaced by machines, just like the men who destroyed factories and left notes from the fictional Ned Ludd, thereby launching the Luddite movement. But here’s the thing, every technology disruption, every one over history, has created more jobs than it destroys. And we have good reason to believe that the AI Revolution will do the same.
Between the two of us, we’ve been in the technology industry for over 70 years. Most of that time is from Pat, who joined Intel at 18, became its CEO, and now is a General Partner at a venture capital firm that invests in deep tech. The other, Naveen, has founded three AI startups, selling one to Intel, another for over a billion dollars, and now leads a third with a valuation of $4.5 billion.
Just as significantly, we both grew up in rural America. Pat grew up on a farm in Robesonia, Pennsylvania (pop. 2,035), and Naveen in the Appalachian coal-mining town of Whitesburg, Kentucky (pop. 1,711). We’ve seen how traditional industries get disrupted, how jobs disappear, and how lives get disrupted by technological changes that come into town whether anyone wanted them or not.
Because AI is creating new processes and products, novel occupations are being churned out as fast as old ones are disappearing. At the Intel fabs where chips are made, Pat had safety technicians. Part of their job was to check for chemical leaks. These were exceedingly dangerous jobs. Most gases coming out of those pipes could kill you. We brought in robot dogs to do that task. That allowed us to move some of those safety technicians to become fleet managers of those dogs, which was not only a much safer and more pleasant job, but a much more interesting one. Plus, those dogs checked the pipes far more often, making the entire fab safer for everyone.
Or take Naveen’s own company. They got a chip designed in six months without a dedicated team, something that wasn’t possible before AI. That’s not a story about needing fewer engineers — it’s a story about how many more things you can try. His company’s growth is being hindered by its inability to hire people fast enough. That’s not a story about needing fewer engineers. It’s a story about how many more things you can try. The limit on building anything hard was about how many attempts you could afford before you ran out of time or money. AI allows engineers to test more ideas, to slough off the grunt work and be more creative.
AI isn’t showing up because we have too many workers. In a lot of places, it’s showing up because we don’t have enough. More than 11,000 Americans turn 65 every single day, and birth rates are falling across most of the developed world. Healthcare is the fastest-growing sector in the country, and the aging that drives it isn’t reversible. The work that’s growing fastest is work done with people and with things — the kind AI is furthest from touching. The AI buildout itself is short roughly 350,000 construction workers this year. Electrician wages are rising two to four times faster than wages overall. An underreported constraint on data center expansion isn’t chips or capital — it’s people who can wire a building.
Labor shortages that used to be cyclical are starting to look permanent. Japan hit this wall years before everyone else and turned to automation; it now has one of the highest concentrations of industrial robots in the world, which is a big part of how its factories and hospitals stay staffed. Two of the fastest-growing job categories in the country right now are construction and healthcare — one that works with things, one that works with people. Neither is what AI is automating. 911 call centers are short-staffed almost everywhere. A company Pat’s venture capital firm has invested in, RapidSOS, uses AI to transcribe and translate calls as they come in, so a dispatcher who speaks only English can take a call in any language. This doesn’t replace anyone. It just means dispatchers spend more of the call on the emergency and less on the paperwork.
In addition to his AI companies, Naveen is also a race car driver (56th place at Le Mans Prototype 2 last year!). When he first got involved in racing, a team consisted of about ten members. The DAG (Data Acquisition Guru) would pull out the data from a car after each race and analyze it. Now, not only is that data received in real time, allowing the engineer to use it to make decisions on refueling and tire changes, but AI grabs and analyzes the radio communication between all the other teams and factors that in too. Teams now have about 20 people. And races are way better.
These job changes seem frightening because past tech revolutions have shut people out. A shoemaker needed unattainable capital to start a boot factory. To join the dot-com boom, you needed the education and engineering mind to write computer code. Not with AI. Anyone can learn to vibe code in a weekend. And for free. There are going to be more entrepreneurs than we can imagine, and they are going to hire people with more interesting jobs than we now have. In turn, they’ll create new products. When Naveen courts new hires, part of his pitch is that he’ll teach them how to start their own company. His only ask is that they let him invest. So far he’s written ten checks. The economy is not a fixed number of jobs. It’s a pie that is about to grow exponentially. When you make the supply easier, it creates a demand. You’re going to have a world in which people want customized software, and they’ll want it right away. That’s a lot of new jobs with titles we haven’t invented yet.
Pat once went to a family reunion in Pennsylvania. His dad came from a family of ten, and all of his father’s brothers and brothers-in-law were around the table. He was looking at Lester and Clarence and the rest of them, and he noticed that not one of them has all his fingers. One cousin had both legs cut off below the knees by a mower, one lost his left arm in a combine, one has permanently dislocated ribs from a cow in labor, and one has a shunt in his brain after being kicked by a bull. Farming is a very rewarding profession, but in romanticizing the past we sometimes forget how rough it was.
Naveen has four kids. His two oldest, 18 and 19, grew up in a world he could largely predict when they were born. The youngest are one and three, and he has no idea what world they’ll inherit. Pat has eight grandchildren who will never do the work his uncles did, with the hands his uncles lost. And all of them will enter a working world neither of us can picture. We’re not worried about whether there’ll be work for them. We’re worried about whether Americans waste the next ten years holding on to a romanticized past instead of building the more interesting world they will inherit.
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