As Silicon Valley debates whether AI will replace millions of office workers, one of the executives building the technology's underlying infrastructure says Gen Z shouldn't buy into the apocalyptic job displacement predictions. Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, argued that forecasts of mass white-collar job losses—including warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level office jobs—don't hold up under scrutiny.
"If you believe that half of jobs get wiped out, the whole economy collapses on itself," Garman said on an episode of the Platformer podcast released Tuesday. "Everything goes away. You're not going to have AI, and then you have to go back to those other jobs at some point. The math doesn't work out."
Instead, Garman said AI will reshape work rather than eliminate it outright. While some jobs may not exist in the future, new jobs will emerge, he argued, because economies simply depend on workers earning money and spending it.
He likened the current AI boom to the arrival of Microsoft Excel, which largely replaced workers who spent their days performing calculations by hand. Those jobs changed, but workers adapted by learning new tools.
"I do think that half of white-collar jobs may change, but wipe out and change are different," Garman added.