By now, you’ve heard from your professors about their AI policies. Perhaps you’ve also heard that AI is destroying the college experience, or that AI might cause the extinction of the human race. Or maybe AI will cure all cancers, end global poverty, and deliver superintelligence for everyone.
It’s no wonder college graduates are booing commencement speakers who talk about AI and doomerism has taken over the news: Everything they have heard about it has convinced them that AI is malignant, or at least dangerously unpredictable.
However, to sit this out and let events take their course could be a lapse of judgment you spend a lifetime regretting. Some of AI’s most outspoken commentators, including Nobel laureates, have also been among the most mistaken.
I run a company that makes autonomous robots, one of the most exciting applications of recent advances in AI, so I have an obvious stake. This also means I see the tradeoffs at street level. Robots are not omniscient beings. They often encounter situations they can’t handle on their own (or they literally run into glass walls).
On the other hand, they enable humans to do more rewarding work. Even though robots may eventually displace some jobs, the track record shows that they also create many new jobs.
Those who embrace new technologies are best placed to shape them and reap their benefits. You are lucky to be living through such a dazzling period of invention. You have the opportunity to help direct these advances toward a better future for yourself and the world at large.
This time is not so different
For more than a century, major breakthroughs have sparked widespread fears of job loss, only to be followed by rising productivity and incomes, entirely new categories of work, and sustained growth in GDP.
Yes, technology has brought about many changes in employment. But that’s not so bad. Two hundred years ago, most of us would have been subsistence farmers, like my grandparents. Today, only 2% of Americans work in agriculture. I think most people reading this would not change places with a farmer of 200 years ago.
Farming jobs evaporated as technologies, from fertilizers to combines, enabled greater productivity, automation, and consolidation. If you were a farming family, these were years of great disruption.
On the other hand, hunger declined to historically unprecedented levels, food prices fell, life expectancy rose, and countless new industries emerged to absorb the workers no longer needed in the fields.
Even as 90% of jobs got displaced, the total number of jobs has increased dramatically, from 44 million in the U.S. in 1920 to 167 million in 2024 — faster than the population grew — while unemployment remained remarkably stable through most of the century.
A century ago, only 5% of workers, or about 2 million people, had professional and managerial jobs; today, it’s 35% of the workforce, or almost 60 million people.
Today, 50 million people worldwide earn money as social media influencers, and 6.5 million of them are making $100,000 a year or more. Could my grandparents have imagined working as social media influencers? Could we ourselves have imagined it, 20 years ago?
“This time is different,” the doomers say. But is it?
The future will be built by you
With AI, we can expect something similar: Some jobs will disappear. Most will be transformed. Many new jobs will emerge, including ones we can’t even imagine today.
Our grandchildren will view the drudgery of many jobs we do today with disbelief, just as we do when we think about lamp lighters, elevator men, or “knocker uppers” (human alarm clocks).
Today, tens of thousands of Americans already work directly in robotics, and many more work in the AI, engineering, manufacturing, maintenance, and operations services that surround the sector. There is always more to do; often more exciting, more rewarding, more fruitful work, thanks to technology.
Consider Charlie Snodgrass, who works as a robotics field technician or “robot wrangler” for our company, Serve Robotics. He saw his work as a delivery driver evaporate, but he was able to find new work and retraining with Serve, supporting our robots in LA. We currently operate more than 2,000 robots across 20 cities. As our robot fleet grows, so does our human workforce, because robots need humans. The jobs we create offer better pay and safer working conditions than the gig work they displace.
So this is the message I want you, and every young person starting out, to hear: Do not let either hype or fear make this choice for you.
Educate yourself on AI. Question it. Learn new ways to use it to solve problems worth solving.
The future of AI is not something that will simply happen to us; it will be built by those who choose to participate. This is your moment to be one of them, and to help make what comes next better than what came before.
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