Gelsinger and Rao: AI will create more jobs than it destroys

Farm families are still suffering from the effects of the Industrial Revolution, which occurred more than a century ago. Absorbing each new technological onslaught has taken society a lot of time, and it also took a while for innovations to fully infiltrate the economy. Not this time — the AI transition is being compressed into a few years.

The authors bring unusual personal history to this debate. Between the two of us, they write, we've been in the technology industry for over 70 years, most of that from Pat, who joined Intel at 18, became its CEO, and now is a General Partner at a venture capital firm that invests in deep tech. Naveen has founded three AI startups, selling one to Intel, another for over a billion dollars, and now leads a third with a valuation of $4.5 billion. Both grew up in rural America — Pat on a farm in Robesonia, Pennsylvania (pop. 2,035), and Naveen in the Appalachian coal-mining town of Whitesburg, Kentucky (pop. 1,711) — and they describe watching traditional industries get disrupted and jobs disappear.

Their examples are concrete. At Intel's fabs, robot dogs now check pipes for chemical leaks that could kill you, freeing safety technicians to become fleet managers of those dogs — a much safer, more pleasant, and more interesting job, they write, while the pipes are checked far more often. In Naveen's current company, a chip was designed in six months without a dedicated team, something that wasn't possible before AI. The authors also note the AI buildout itself is short roughly 350,000 construction workers this year. The stakes, as they see them, are less about whether work will exist than whether Americans waste the next ten years holding on to a romanticized past instead of building the more interesting world they will inherit.