Sam Altman thinks artificial intelligence is about to hit the job market, and customer service workers will be the first to feel it.
“I’m confident that a lot of current customer support that happens over a phone or computer, those people will lose their jobs, and that’ll be better done by an AI,” the OpenAI CEO said in an interview on “The Tucker Carlson Show” on Wednesday.
But Altman doesn’t see the shift as unprecedented. He compared it to the long arc of employment shifts, noting that societies historically cycle through large job changes every few generations.
“Someone told me recently that the historical average is about 50% of jobs significantly change. Maybe they don’t totally go away, but significantly change every 75 years on average,” he said.
Where past disruptions stretched over decades, Altman believes AI could compress that timeline.
“My controversial take would be that this is going to be like a punctuated equilibria moment where a lot of that will happen in a short period of time,” he said. “But if we zoom out, it’s not going to be dramatically different than the historical rate.”
He suggested that the result could be a wave of turnover that looks familiar in scale but unfolds faster than previous industrial shifts.
Still, he said, professions like nurses are likely safe because “people really want the deep human connection with a person,” while he said he was uncertain about programming.
Developers are more productive than ever with AI, Altman said, but “if we fast forward another five or ten years, what does that look like? Is it more jobs or less? That one I’m uncertain on.”
Other experts see AI as a break with history, not just a faster version of it
Tech leaders and AI researchers have also drawn their own historical parallels — some dire, others more optimistic — to try to predict how far AI could reshape or eliminate jobs.
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Adam Dorr, director of research at the RethinkX think tank, told The Guardian in July that AI and robotics could make jobs obsolete by 2045, comparing workers to horses in the age of cars, or traditional cameras in the age of digital photography.
Other experts are more cautious in drawing straight lines from the past.
Ethan Mollick, an entrepreneurship and innovation professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told NPR in 2023 that technology often boosts productivity and, over time, creates better jobs. “It’s possible that in the end, we get better jobs, but in the short term, there’s a lot of disruption,” he said.
There are also cases where automation actually expanded employment.
In 2023, Lindsey Raymond, a then-Ph.D. Candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, highlighted the cotton gin invention in the late 1700s, which made production so much cheaper that demand soared, boosting overall employment, though she warned that a similar dynamic in customer service could mean more competition and lower wages.
Historians warned that disruption doesn’t always balance out. In 2023, Brian Merchant, author of “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech,” compared today’s moment to the Luddite rebellions of the early 1800s, when clothworkers smashed the weaving machines that devalued their craft.
The Industrial Revolution didn’t erase jobs outright, he said, but often replaced skilled, well-paid roles with dangerous, low-wage factory work. “Just about everyone loses except the factory owners,” he said.
