A former presidential candidate and the cofounder of Facebook met this week to debate one of the biggest questions swirling around AI: Will the tech eliminate jobs, or will it foster new ones?
Andrew Yang, the Venture for America founder who ran as a Democrat in the 2020 primary, argued that AI will make work obsolete. Chris Hughes, who left Facebook soon after its founding to become an author and entrepreneur, took the opposite and optimistic perspective, insisting history shows workforces will adapt and that new roles will pop up.
The event at Johns Hopkins University’s DC campus, part of the Open to Debate series, ended with the audience siding firmly with Hughes: 62.7% of attendees rejected the idea that AI will eliminate the workforce.
Two experts joined the conversation on stage. Simon Johnson, a Nobel prize–winning economist and entrepreneurship professor at MIT, debated alongside Yang. Rumman Chowdhury, a data and social scientist and cofounder of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence, helped underscore Hughes’ viewpoint.
Over the course of the evening, the debaters exposed fault lines around employment, higher education and who benefits when productivity surges.
The distraction of focusing on a ‘jobless’ future
Yang asserted that office job disruptions have already begun. He gave the example of one of his own companies, Nobile Mobile.
When the phone plan startup launched last year with a $10.3 million seed round, the plan was to hire junior engineers, Yang said. But he and his team decided to lean on AI tools instead.
“My CTO came to me and said … I think we can take that posting down,” Yang said. “Think about what that means at our little company, times the thousands of other companies that are making the same decision.”
Tech hiring has slowed nationally, and the number of tech jobs in the DMV dipped. Yang said he’s spoken with CEOs who are planning mass layoffs, and cited recent moves from Amazon and Verizon to let go of thousands of workers — which some say are the result of pandemic overhiring — as evidence that the AI effect will be “existential.”
“I have started to call this process the ‘fuckening,’” Yang said on stage, to scattered laughter. “I have bad news, America. The fuckening is here.”
Yang and debate partner Johnson both characterized this moment as similar to the automation of manufacturing, but said it’s more severe because AI systems are designed to replicate cognitive labor, from coding to research to customer service, not just manual labor.
On the other side, Hughes rejected that AI is fundamentally different from other technological advances, arguing that productivity gains often shift work, rather than erase it. He pointed to the introduction of ATMs as an example.
When ATMs started spreading, some experts predicted they would replace bank tellers. What ended up happening: the number of tellers per branch went down, but because of lower operating costs, the total number of branches increased, ultimately increasing employment in the field.
Hughes argued that focusing on a “jobless” extreme distracts from other issues.
“The more time that we spend focused on the siren song of a jobless, workless future,” Hughes said, “is less time that we focus on the practical project of figuring out how to smooth the transition for the workers who will need our help the most.”
Preparing for a future with a very different job mix
During his presidential run, Yang rallied for universal basic income, a system in which every adult receives a regular, unconditional cash payment from the government.
On stage, his debate partner Johnson made a suggestion in a similar vein, saying AI-driven tech giants should be taxed more, and then that money should be given directly to working Americans. He warned that without a redistribution mechanism like this, wealth generated by AI would pool around the owners of these systems.
Hughes’ partner Chowdhury, in contrast, said she doesn’t want to “get a welfare check from Sam Altman.” Instead, she asserted, policies should focus on upward mobility and agency for workers through upskilling, reskilling and job training.
“The side that Chris and I are arguing is for dignity of work,” Chowdhury said, “for us to have good policies that enable us to do the jobs that we want.”
She also emphasized the need for college students and graduates to adapt: “There was no linear path to my career, and the jobs that I could have had and left behind are all still viable career pathways,” she said. “You have to remain flexible.”
On education, Yang said that while degrees were once a reliable ticket to stable employment, he now believes universities aren’t equipping students with in-demand skills. He advised people not to “hide out” in grad school, because it’s expensive and may not offer a return on investment.
Hughes countered that college remains critical for building foundational skills, and teaches lessons a machine cannot do.
“There are a whole host of jobs that I think will demand the most human characteristics that I can imagine,” Hughes said. “Judgment, compassion, the ability to have empathy.”
