OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he believes young people starting their careers nowadays have a “huge advantage,” despite concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) changing the job market.
Altman told Cleo Abram on her “Huge If True” podcast that if he were graduating from university right now, he would “feel like the luckiest kid in all of history.” While he admits that “some classes of jobs will totally go away,” he said he believed that younger people were better at adjusting to change than older workers. “I’m more worried about what it means, not for the 22-year-old, but for the 62-year-old that doesn’t want to go retrain or reskill or whatever the politicians call it,” he said, according to Fortune.
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Altman said that the coming decade would be the most exciting time in history to start a career, especially those who dream about working in space. “In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job,” he said. He added that they’ll also be “feeling so bad for you and I that we had to do this really boring, old work and everything is just better.”
Altman believes that tools like AI can help enable a future where one person could start a billion-dollar company and create amazing products without needing the large teams that were once necessary. He says that this will give young people the opportunity to “try new ideas, build quickly, and innovate like never before.”
Altman also said that big changes have always happened, and society always finds a way to cope. He says that younger people are especially ready to learn new skills when the world changes, but also, that the speed of AI’s progress makes it “hard to imagine” what the next decade would look like.
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Other tech entrepreneurs have also commented on how AI would reshape work in the future. Bill Gates said earlier this year that the technology might reduce the length of the workweek.
“What will jobs be like? Should we just work like two or three days a week?” he told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show earlier this year. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that AI has already given his workers “superhuman” skills—something that will only increase as the technology advances. “I’m surrounded by superhuman people and super intelligence from my perspective because they’re the best in the world at what they do. And they do what they do way better than I can do it. And I’m surrounded by thousands of them. Yet it never one day caused me to think, all of a sudden, I’m no longer necessary,” he told Abrams on a different podcast episode.