While speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 21, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said AI could bring about “civil unrest” by destroying jobs, and that businesses and governments need to step in to help.
He made the comments in response to a question about whether AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next several years. Dimon said he believes the impact won’t be as catastrophic to the labor market as some are predicting, but he also didn’t deny some inevitable upheaval. “Don’t put your head in the sand,” he urged. “It is what it is. We’re gonna deploy it.”
He continued, “Will it eliminate jobs? Yes. Will it change jobs? Yes. Will it add some jobs? Probably. . . . However, it may go too fast for society, and if it goes too fast for society that’s where governments and businesses [need to] in a collaborative way step in together and come up with a way to retrain people and move it over time.”
Dimon pitched the idea that local governments and businesses are going to need to provide support to workers in the form of income assistance programs, relocation assistance, and retraining to avoid mass unemployment. “We’re not gonna kill all of our employees because of AI,” he said. “We’re just not.”
The CEO also said that phasing in the technology slowly is the best approach in order to give people time to adjust and for businesses to come up with solutions, even if that means additional government regulation. He cautioned that companies should not conduct mass layoffs all at once: “You’ll have civil unrest.”
“You want the government to tell you you can’t lay off a whole bunch of people at JPMorgan?” moderator Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, asked.
“We’d agree,” Dimon replied. “If we have to do that to save society.” He caveated this should be done at a local level—for example, governments providing incentives for retraining employees or giving them assistance.
In the past, Dimon hasn’t been shy about criticizing the government for too much regulation or what he deems the wrong regulation. In fact, he opposes other precautionary measures like capping credit card interest at 10%. Last year, he called the government “inefficient” and “not very competent” and said he hoped the Department of Government Efficiency would be “quite successful.”
Regardless of the worries that Dimon expressed about the pace of AI, job losses, and the potential for the technology to “do something terrible,” he seemed ready to accept his own company’s fate—whatever it may be. When asked if JPMorgan will have fewer employees over the next five years, he predicted that it would.
Still, not everyone agreed with Dimon’s statements on AI’s impact on jobs. Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said that labor shortages are the issue we should be more concerned with, arguing that AI is actually creating more roles than it is stealing. “This is the largest infrastructure build-out in human history,” Huang said. “That’s gonna create a lot of jobs.”