There’s no shortage of dire predictions on how AI will impact jobs, but an AI pioneer believes that AI will create a jobs surplus instead.
Andrew Ng — co-founder of Google Brain, former chief scientist at Baidu, and a foundational voice in modern AI — has had enough. “Telling overblown stories of large-scale unemployment is irresponsible and damaging,” he wrote in a recent post. “Let’s put a stop to it.”
Ng’s argument is simple but pointed: “AI — like any other technology — does affect jobs,” but the jobpocalypse narrative has ballooned well beyond what the data supports. Software engineering is the sector most affected by AI tools, as coding agents race ahead. Yet hiring of software engineers remains strong. The U.S. unemployment rate sits at a healthy 4.3%. The trends, Ng says, “strongly suggest the net job creation is vastly greater than the job destruction — just like earlier waves of technology.”
So why does the narrative keep winning? Follow the money.
“Frontier AI labs have a strong incentive to tell stories that make AI technology sound more powerful,” Ng writes. “At their most extreme, they promote science-fiction scenarios of AI ‘taking over’ and causing human extinction.” The logic is circular but effective: a technology scary enough to replace entire workforces must be valuable enough to pay a premium for.
That premium is the other piece of the puzzle. SaaS software typically runs $100–$1,000 per user per year. But as Ng explains, “if an AI company can replace an employee who makes $100,000 — or make them 50% more productive — then charging even $10,000 starts to look reasonable.” By anchoring pricing to salaries rather than software comps, AI companies can charge dramatically more — and the jobpocalypse story is what makes that math work.
Then there are the businesses themselves. “Businesses have a strong incentive to talk about layoffs as if they were caused by AI,” Ng notes. “Talking about how they’re using AI to be far more productive with fewer staff makes them look smart.” It’s a cleaner story than the truth: that many companies overhired during the pandemic when capital was cheap, interest rates were near zero, and government stimulus was flowing freely.
Ng is careful not to be dismissive of the disruption that is actually happening. “I recognize that AI is causing a lot of people’s work to change. This is hard. This is stressful.” But he draws a firm line between acknowledging change and predicting collapse. History, he argues, shows how badly societies can misread transformative moments. “Fears over nuclear plant safety led to under-investment in nuclear power. Fears of the ‘population bomb’ in the 1960s led countries to implement harsh policies to reduce their populations. And worries about dietary fat led governments to promote unhealthy high-sugar diets for decades.” The AI jobs panic, he suggests, belongs in the same category.
With mainstream media now pushing back on the jobpocalypse narrative, Ng sees the tide turning. And he’s ready with his own counter-prediction. “Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza!”
His case: AI will generate a wave of good AI engineering jobs, many of them outside the traditional tech employer base. “What AI engineers do will be different from traditional software engineering,” he writes, “and many of these jobs will be in businesses other than traditional large employers of developers.” Across non-AI roles, the skills needed will shift too — which makes this, in Ng’s view, exactly the right moment to push more people toward AI proficiency and make sure they’re “ready for the different but plentiful jobs of the future.”
The technology is transformative. The disruption is real. The apocalypse, Ng insists, is not.