Hey, AI Job Doomers: Wanna Bet?

When I was younger, my older brother and I would constantly make bets over disagreements.

“Wanna bet? Wanna bet?” We did, and I usually lost.

I’m reminded of that every time I read luminaries who predict AI will destroy jobs. It makes me want to say: “Wanna bet?”

In July, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla warned that AI will be able to perform 80 percent of any job within five years, and that by 2040 people won’t need to work to survive. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “CEOs are no longer dodging the question of whether AI takes jobs. Now they are giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go.”

Predicting massive job destruction has become the fashionable way to show you “get it” and sympathize with the so-called huddled masses.

And it’s not just job loss; it’s inequality, too. A Stanford professor recently told me we are headed toward a two-tier society, with elites using AI while everyone else is reduced to a kind of lumpenproletariat.

These claims are not only wrong; they are deeply troubling. Their main effect is to gin up fear and loathing, and we all know what comes next: calls for AI regulation and taxation, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu has urged.

Slowing AI adoption would be a disaster, given America’s three major economic crises:

1. The massive budget deficit (which the Big Beautiful Bill only made worse)
2. The demographic crisis of retiring boomers
3. The anemic rate of labor productivity growth

Taken together, these paint a bleak picture—fiscal strain, entitlement pressures, and stagnant wage growth.

You’d think that now, when we finally have a general-purpose technology capable of boosting productivity growth, leaders and pundits would be cheering AI on, not scaring the living @%$$ out of workers.

Claims that AI-driven job destruction is inevitable could not be further from the truth. In reality, if we’re lucky, AI will boost U.S. labor productivity growth from around 1 percent a year to 2 percent. That additional income will be spent across the economy, supporting workers of all kinds, such as personal trainers, college professors, carpenters, and more.

We need more CEOs like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who rightly calls such doomsday predictions “overly alarmist.”

So, in the spirit of those childhood bets: AI doomers, wanna bet $100 that by September 2027 there will be more white-collar jobs in America than there are today? Any takers, especially CEOs and VCs? Vinod, if you want to take my bet, it’s only about 0.0000011 percent of your net worth.