Dispatches from Tokyo on AI, Japan & what it means to be human.
MBA × Sales & CS practitioner.
Writing what no one else can — from the inside.
ghostnotestokyo.s
Sam Altman said something this week that most AI CEOs would never say publicly.
He called out the other executives in the room.
"I know some AI CEOs are saying things like 50% of the jobs are going to go away. To say nothing of how tone deaf it is for someone to be saying my company is going to eliminate 50% of the jobs AND my company is going to be the most valuable company in human history."
The criticism isn't that job change isn't coming, it is and Altman said that clearly.
His point is that framing mass displacement as an inevitable feature while simultaneously positioning your company as the biggest winner in history is a special kind of detached from reality.
And the data actually backs him up on the nuance here.
In 2024, AI directly created over 119,900 jobs mostly in data centers, infrastructure, and AI development itself.
Jobs lost to AI in the same period roughly 12,700 and that's less than 0.1% of all layoffs that year.
The World Economic Forum projects 92 million roles displaced by 2030, but 170 million new ones created, a net gain of 78 million jobs globally.
History says this pattern holds every time.
When the PC went mainstream, entire categories of jobs vanished, entire industries we now take for granted didn't exist, 60% of U.S. workers today are in occupations that didn't exist in 1940.
What Altman is actually saying is something more sophisticated than don't worry.
He's saying that productivity gains from AI don't reduce work, they raise expectations.
Faster output leads to bigger goals, tighter timelines, and more ambitious projects. The work expands to fill the capacity.
The fear isn't irrational but the framing is just wrong.
After 3 years using Claude, I can say it’s the technology that has revolutionized my life.
Here are 18 prompts I use daily that have transformed my day to day; they could do the same for you:
(Save this 🔖)
Elon Musk has time to run 4 billion dollars companies, reply to strangers on Twitter, and father of 14 kids..
But that girl you're seeing takes 16 hours to reply because she's busy..
move on bro