Which jobs are safe from AI? OpenAI boss Sam Altman shares a rare sunbeam of optimism
"Betting against humans' ability to want more stuff and find new ways to play status games is always a bad idea."
If the doomers are to be believed, humanity has a few short years left until AI takes most of our jobs and the vast majority of our clapped-out species are consigned to eternal unemployment.
Clearly, the AI industry has a vested interest in making sure the huddled masses don't start to believe this too passionately, because there is a very real risk that we useless eaters will rise up against Skynet well before it casts us into perpetual inescapable poverty.
So are we to believe OpenAI boss Sam Altman's latest prediction that we should stop worrying about technological unemployment and start believing that humans truly do have a future in the workplace of tomorrow?
Or is he one of the AI bosses who are said to publicly say positive things, while privately operating under the understanding that AI's rise means the inevitable doom of our species (more on this later)?
Altman spoke out today to back recent ray of light job forecasts from Nvidia boss Jensen Huang - who is a notable AI optimist and perhaps the only non-rockstar middle-aged male that can get away with wearing a leather jacket past the age 35.
agree with lots of what jensen has been saying about ai and jobs; there is a ton of stuff to do in the world.
— Sam Altman (@sama) July 16, 2025
people will
1) do a lot more than they could do before; ability and expectation will both go up
2) still care very much about other people and what they do
3) still be…
"Agree with lots of what Jensen has been saying about AI and jobs; there is a ton of stuff to do in the world," said the OpenAI boss, who is noted here at Machine for his croaky vocal fry voice and love of semicolons.
He said AI will enable people to "do a lot more than they could do before", meaning both "ability and expectation" will increase.
Humans will also continue to be driven by "creating and being useful to others", as well as our seemingly ineluctable desire to amass more possessions, achieve a higher status and find new ways of expressing ourselves.
"For sure jobs will be very different, and maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us today while still being very meaningful to those people of the future," he added.
"Betting against humans' ability to want more stuff, find new ways to play status games, find new methods for creative expression, etc, is always a bad bet. Maybe human money and machine money will be totally different things, who knows, but we have a LOT of main character energy."
Jensen Huang predicts a bright future for humanity in the age of AI
The Nvidia CEO is an outspoken proponent of the theory that AI will create more jobs, rather than destroying all of them.
He recently said: "You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI."
In an interview with Axios this week, Huang said: "I don't know why AI companies are trying to scare us."
READ MORE: OpenAI delays open-weight model release: What are the potential catastrophic and existential risks of unclosed AI?
He predicted that productivity will rise, just as it did after the mechanisation of farming, GDP will soar and new jobs will be created as AI makes every human in the workplace more effective.
When asked about a classic AI doomer scenario - truckers losing their jobs to robo-drivers - he said long-haul drivers "really don't love their jobs" and would much prefer if machines did the big drives and they had jobs which allowed them to work near their homes and families.
"The AI revolution is both an incredible technology and the beginning of a whole new industrial reset," he said.
What does Silicon Valley say about AI and the future of humanity?
Elon Musk is the most famous doomer in the world, famously saying that "none of us will have jobs" and warning that there is a 20% risk that humanity has a 20% chance of "annihilation".
Dario Amodei, boss of the AI firm Anthropic, also predicted that AI would wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment by up to 20% within one to five years.
Anthropic is known for the grimness of its forecasts, recently warning about the "catastrophic" risk that models could be misused to help make bioweapons (although some analysts say doominess is all part of the AI hype machine).
The reason we asked whether Sam Altman is sincere in his optimism is because Steven Bartlett, a British millionaire social media mogul and podcast supremo, claimed to have heard that one top AI CEO publicly tells the world that "everything will be fine" – but privately expects something "pretty horrific" to happen.
READ MORE: Is AI scheming against humanity? Not so fast, says UK government as it slams "lurid" claims
We don't know whether the unnamed tech CEO is Altman - and there's nothing to suggest it is.
But if Bartlett is telling the truth about AI boss that's "totally cool" with the nightmare scenario facing humanity, it certainly makes us want to think a little harder about rare sunbeams of optimism when we see them.
