AI won't cause mass unemployment, top tech bosses now argue - Singapore News

31 May 2026, 07:31 · The Independent

With the backlash against AI not only having begun but also gaining steam, especially among the young, some top tech executives are beginning to take back what they initially said that the technology would be responsible for doing away with many jobs.

AI-driven layoffs have taken centre stage in the news of late. Just last week, Standard Chartered announced that it was cutting around 7,800 jobs by 2030 as it employs AI to streamline its workforce, while Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, began informing thousands of its employees that they were being retrenched. Amazon slashed 30,000 corporate jobs in late 2025 and early 2026, and Oracle also removed the same number of positions as part of a multi-billion-dollar restructuring.

This may just be the beginning, given that Goldman Sachs estimated in 2023 that AI may yet displace tasks equal to 300 million full-time jobs across the globe.

In Singapore, the recent job cuts announcements had drawn sharp criticism from former President Halimah Yacob, as well as from ex-PAP MP and Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Home Affairs Amrin Amin.

Amid these job losses and fears of a much-tighter job market, the youngest cohort of workers, Gen Z, has begun to reject AI, especially in the United States.

What some tech bigwigs are saying

Perhaps in reaction to the backlash, some top tech executives have begun to say that the situation may not be so bad after all.

At the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Accelerate AI Conference in Sydney, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said that the speed with which AI is developing will not produce the “jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,” according to an AFP report.

Mr Altman added that he “thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.”

Meanwhile, Jensen Huang, who heads the specialised chip company Nvidia, told CNA earlier this week that it’s “too lazy” for company executives to publicly blame AI for substantial job cuts.

“The narrative that connects AI to job loss, for many of the CEOs that are doing it, is just too lazy. AI has just arrived. How is it possible they’re already losing jobs?” Mr Huang said, adding that he believes this was being said to make executives “sound smart,” but they just ended up “scaring people.”

When asked by CNA’s Victoria Jen what he would say to people who are afraid of losing their jobs due to AI, his advice to them would be to learn AI.

“You’re not going to lose your jobs to AI, you’re going to lose your job to somebody who learnt AI better than you,” he added. /TISG

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