Musk vs Jen-Hsun Huang: Will AI really cause unemployment or make people busier?

At the Saudi Investment Forum, two tech pros got into a heated argument.

Musk said AI will liberate humanity, making work optional—over the next 10 to 20 years, AI and robots will eliminate poverty, and everyone can “get rich.” He used gardening as a metaphor: if you want to do it, you do it; if you don't want to, you don't.

Jensen Huang publicly dismantles the myth: Look at radiologists, everyone thought they would be the first to lose their jobs, but what happened? Hiring actually increased. Why? Because AI improved the efficiency of reading images, doctors can see more patients, take on more cases, and are busier.

Who is right? Data speaks.

Data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows that the number of unemployed in the tech industry jumped from 98,000 in December of last year to 152,000 in January this year. A survey by ResumeBuilder is more straightforward—among 750 bosses using AI, 37% said AI has replaced employees, and 44% said they would lay off workers in 2024 directly due to increased efficiency.

However, the phenomenon pointed out by Jensen Huang does exist: lawyers using AI to handle documents have seen their cases double; programmers using AI to write code have had the requested features increase as well. Efficiency has improved, but people find themselves busier.

Key Differences: Who is Benefiting

Musk's logic is based on an assumption — that as technology advances, wealth will be naturally distributed to all. But history tells a different story: during the Industrial Revolution, people predicted that machines would liberate humanity, but instead, workers labored for 16 hours a day; in the internet age, the promotion of paperless offices was supposed to shorten work hours, yet it resulted in everyone being online 24 hours a day.

Technology has indeed created immense wealth, but the money flows to the people who own the technology, not to those who are replaced by it.

A detail revealed at this forum highlights the issue: Six years ago, 90% of the world's Top 500 supercomputers used CPUs, but this percentage has dropped to 15% this year, while accelerated computing has increased from 10% to 90%—behind this is the reshuffling of several hundred billion dollars in computing resources.

What did Musk and Huang Renxun discuss? Building a 500 megawatt data center in the desert, space AI satellites, and trillions of dollars in infrastructure. Musk also stated that Tesla aims to produce 1 billion humanoid robots a year, which at $20,000 per unit, is a $25 to $30 trillion business.

Who benefits from the returns of these investments? A very small number of people who control computing power, manage models, and own platforms. Ordinary workers whose efficiency is improved by AI? Their bargaining power will only decrease.

What AI Changes

What Huang Renxun sees as the essence is: AI will not make jobs disappear, it will only change the nature of work. The value of radiologists lies not in reading images, but in diagnosis and communicating with patients—AI takes over the standardizable parts, while humans are responsible for the judgment, empathy, and accountability aspects.

Interestingly, Musk himself has said that he will become busier because of AI, as he has too many ideas in his head. A person who holds computing power and controls the platform has a fundamentally different understanding of “work optional” compared to someone who only knows how to use tools.

Cruel Future Speculations

The IMF predicts that AI will affect nearly 40% of jobs globally, with developed countries potentially reaching 60%. What lies behind these numbers?

Anyone can use AI to write papers now, will the admission rate of prestigious schools increase? No. Everyone can use AI to start a business now, and the competition for market share will only become fiercer.

A designer used to take a week to hand-draw a poster, but now with AI, it only takes ten minutes. However, the client requests twenty versions in a week. Efficiency has increased, but time has not been saved, and the workload has become even more intensive.

Elon Musk's vision of a future where everyone is wealthy is predicated on the elimination of competition itself. But this has never happened in human history. The earth is limited, computing power is limited, and attention is limited—resource scarcity will never disappear.

The truth may be

AI will indeed create a future where jobs are optional, but in that future, the “people” are not everyone, but the small group of people who master AI.

For these people, work becomes a hobby, as money comes from capital and technological appreciation, not from selling labor. For most people, AI will only make work more unstable, more fragmented, and more like something they have to do just to survive.

Back to the beginning: Musk depicts the scenery at the tip of the tower, while Huang Renxun talks about the reality of the tower's body. Neither of them is wrong; they just have different standpoints.

Technology will never automatically bring about equality; it will only amplify the existing power structures. The future of AI is not about making jobs disappear, but rather shifting the definition of work.