Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, has said artificial intelligence “may go too fast for society” and cause “civil unrest” unless governments and business support displaced workers.
While advances in AI will have huge benefits, from increasing productivity to curing diseases, the technology may need to be phased in to “save society”, he said.
Dimon said companies and governments could not ignore AI or “put your head in the sand”. The Wall Street lender would probably have fewer employees in five years’ time as it rolled out AI, he told an audience at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.
“Your competitors are going to use it and countries are going to use it,” he said. “However, it may go too fast for society and if it goes too fast for society that’s where governments and businesses [need to] in a collaborative way step in together and come up with a way to retrain people and move it over time.”
Dimon said local governments may need to use assistance programmes that supported wages and offered retraining, relocation and early retirement.
The 2 million commercial lorry drivers in the US were an example of an area that may need support as driverless trucks hit the road, he said.
“Should you do it all at once, if 2 million people go from driving a truck and making $150,000 a year to a next job [that] might be $25,000? No. You will have civil unrest. So phase it in,” Dimon said.
“If we have to do that to save society … Society will have more production, we are going to cure a lot of cancers, you’re not going to slow it down. How do you have plans in place if it does something terrible?”
Dimon, who was speaking before Donald Trump’s address, offered a restrained critique of the US president’s increasingly combative approach to Europe and Nato and demands to take over Greenland.
“If the goal is to make them stronger rather than fragment Europe, I think that’s OK,” Dimon said. “I would be using our moral persuasion, our economic persuasion, our intelligence and military to push Europe to do the things that’s right for Europe. The leadership of Europe has to do it, it really can’t be done by America.”
Dimon revealed his concerns about Trump’s immigration clampdown, calling for “internal anger” over the issue to be calmed down.
“I don’t like what I’m seeing with five grown men beating up little women,” Dimon said, referring to scenes of violence involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Rounding up criminals was one thing, Dimon added, but he would like to see data showing who had been rounded up and whether they had broken the law.
Dimon said many migrants played important roles in the US economy, such as in healthcare, hospitality and agriculture. “We all know them. They are good people and they should be treated that way,” he said.
Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the semiconductor maker Nvidia, whose chips are used to power many AI systems, argued that labour shortages rather than mass payoffs were the threat.
Playing down fears of AI-driven job losses, Huang told the meeting in Davos that “energy’s creating jobs, the chips industry is creating jobs, the infrastructure layer is creating jobs … jobs, jobs, jobs”.
He added: “This is the largest infrastructure buildout in human history, this is going to create a lot of jobs.”
Many of those jobs related to tradecraft, Huang said, such as plumbers, electricians, construction, steelworkers, network technicians, and people who install equipment for AI rollout. This was already pushing up salaries in this area in the US, he added, for people involved in building chip factories or AI datacentres.
Huang also argued that AI robotics was a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity for Europe, as the region had an “incredibly strong” industrial manufacturing base.
“This is your opportunity to now leap past the era of software,” he argued, an area where Silicon Valley has long outperformed Europe.
