Jeff Bezos says utopia is right around the corner; we should just keep pushing and, importantly, keep funding companies like the ones he runs. In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin didn’t deny that artificial intelligence will be disruptive; he just happens to think that it’ll be in a way that creates endless abundance. Easy for a guy who already has infinite wealth to say.
“If you’ve been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel and somebody’s about to hand you a bulldozer, you should be so happy,” Bezos told CNBC anchor and New York Times columnist Aaron Ross Sorkin. “What’s really going to happen is we are going to have so much productivity in our economy,” he said, insisting that rather than replacing human workers, AI will “elevate all of these people.”
Just how much will it elevate them? So much so that there’s going to be job shortages and deflation—not because the economy is going to tank now that we’ve so thoroughly hitched our wagons to a technology that has yet to produce much meaningful productivity improvements, but because people will just willingly quit their jobs and enjoy their labor-free life.
“A lot of people who have two-earner income households, one of those people are going to drop out of the workforce,” Bezos said. “I predict we will actually have deflation, assuming we let this technology play out and don’t hamstring it with regulation too early. Everything, food will get cheaper, housing construction will get cheaper.”
Maybe Bezos and company are just helping people transition into that reality by laying off tens of thousands of people while talking up how AI can do their jobs instead. That’s not exactly handing those workers a bulldozer, more like running them over with one that, it turns out, isn’t actually that great at digging dirt. Also, if you wanted to use Amazon as an indicator of consumer prices, you’d find that things also aren’t getting cheaper—prices just keep going up. So things are getting more expensive, and people are getting displaced by largely untested and ineffective technology, but if we just keep doing that, it’ll all work itself out.
That also seems to be Bezos’ attitude toward the current massive amount of money pouring into the AI industry: it’s good, actually, and even if it’s bad, that is also good! “Even if it does turn out to be a bubble, you shouldn’t worry about it because the bubble is driving investment and a lot of the investment is going to turn out to be very healthy,” he said. Famously, bubbles just work themselves out without any ripple effects. Anyway, please make sure the industry keeps the money flowing to things like Project Prometheus, Bezos’ AI robotics startup that just raised $10 billion despite not even being six months old.
It’s hard not to read Bezos’ techno-optimism as self-serving in a number of ways. There’s the direct effect: he’s raising money for his own AI venture. But there’s some additional sleight of hand happening here. Bezos says that unregulated AI will lead to so much productivity and cheaper goods that people will be able to drop out of the workforce and live comfortably—but that can only be achieved by the free market, you see. Taxing billionaires more won’t help anyone.
“If people want me to pay more billions right, then let’s have that debate, but don’t pretend that that’s going to solve the problem,” Bezos told CNBC. “You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you.”
Just as a reminder, ProPublica reported in 2021 that Bezos is among several billionaires who effectively dodge taxes through a strategy of borrowing against their immense wealth held in company stock—saving them from having to claim the money as income and pay taxes on it. Through that strategy, Bezos was paying an effective tax rate of under 1% on his wealth, per ProPublica’s findings. Now, taxing Bezos at the 37% top marginal tax rate that everyone else is expected to pay certainly wouldn’t solve everything. But it could help to expand the social safety net. You can bet the teacher in Queens would benefit more from that than from another Bezos startup getting funded.
