Sam Altman says learning AI will keep humans employed. Here's why else the robots might not take your job.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman advises students to learn AI to stay relevant in the job market.
• Altman's advice contrasts with Vinod Khosla's warning that AI could replace many jobs.

There's been a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence snatching jobs from us poor humans.

And if our robot overlords in waiting have been listening, they've heard many a tech leader and thinker repeat the idea that AI won't take your job, but someone who knows how to use it will.

That notion got thrust back into the spotlight recently when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that students worried that AI will sideline them should double down on learning to use the technology — an approach that he said worked for him with computer programming.

"I'm confident that there will be lots of jobs and also that many of them will look somewhat different than the jobs of today, but we never seem to run out of stuff to do," Altman said in a taped interview with Indeed CEO Chris Hyams released Thursday.

Altman's sunny take was at odds with one offered days earlier by Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, who warned that AI would one day be able to take on 80% of the work of 80% of jobs. He also said that, unlike with earlier tech waves, workers might not be able to simply build their skills to inoculate themselves against job losses.

Yet despite all the worrying about how AI might pillory the job market, people from execs to students appear to be pushing ahead with what Altman would recommend: going deep on the tech.

Altman noted that computer programming was already popular when he was in school but "nothing like" today. "People would say the same things — many of the same things — they say about AI now," he said.

Humans have a lot of skills

Another point for the don't-worry camp came from a new Indeed study identifying more than 2,800 work skills. The job site's researchers, using lengthy prompts with a generative AI tool, determined that none of those skills were "very likely" to be replaced by GenAI.

Svenja Gudell, Indeed's chief economist, told BI that so-called upskilling can offer big benefits but isn't "magic." She said some people could still lose their jobs due to technological advancements.

"They'll have to figure out how to use these tools. It won't be easy," Gudell said.

But "at least with the technology that we're seeing today, it's not the kind of AI automation where you have smart robots working in warehouses," she said.

Khosla, who cofounded Sun Microsystems and who has invested in OpenAI, had warned that bipedal robots were one of the developments that would imperil humans' abilities to hang onto their jobs.

Before the robots show up to stock store shelves, they'd be more likely to come for desk jobs.

For now, Indeed's Gudell said, there's been a pickup in demand and pay for people well-versed in aspects of AI.

"If you're a prompt engineer — if you're a machine learning engineer that can actually program some of this stuff — you're getting a very healthy wage increase," Gudell said.

One of the professions that would appear most at risk of an AI takeover is coding. Yet, as BI previously reported, some experienced software engineers contend that AI will help them get more done without taking over their jobs because their work extends well beyond coding.

Kids are still learning to code

It seems worries about an AI job-pocalypse aren't deterring some people from going big on tech, as Altman advises.

Edward Kim is vice president of education and training at Code Ninjas. The company teaches software engineering to kids ages five to 14 through in-person classes in the US, Canada, and the UK.

He told BI the company is seeing strong demand from people hoping to open franchise locations. Within two years, the company plans to add 200 locations on top of the more than 350 it has now.

The professional coders Kim talks to already use AI to do things like generating starter code. But these engineers aren't that worried about getting pushed out of their jobs, he said, because coders are working for people who need them to do more than just write line after line in various programming languages.

Employers need "someone with a real-world context to put the right adaptation to it, to make it applicable to something in the real world, so it can be useful," Kim said (aka: be a human).

A couple of years ago, Code Ninjas' students might take around 18 months to become proficient in a new language. Now, he said, it's closer to six to 12 months for those same languages.

"It shows that the kids that are coming up have an increasing thirst for this type of knowledge," Kim said.

It's a desire to learn that Altman indicated he showed back when he was a student. He said computer programming had been a net positive.

"It has made some classes of jobs go away," Altman said. Still, "it's made way more new things happen and also given us the ability to do a lot of new things."

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