AI won't replace human workers, but 'people that use it will replace people that don't,' AI expert Andrew Ng says

Andrew Ng, the founder of Google Brain and a professor at Stanford University, is optimistic about how AI will transform the labor market.

• AI experts debate the tech's impact on jobs, with some seeing growth and others concerned.
• Andrew Ng, Google Brain founder, believes AI will transform but not replace jobs.
• Ng argues Big Tech inflates AI threats to stifle competition and push for legislation.

AI experts tend to agree that rapid advances in the technology will impact jobs. But there's a clear division growing between those who see that as a cause for concern and those who believe it heralds a future of growth.

Andrew Ng, the founder of Google Brain and a professor at Stanford University, is in the latter camp. He's optimistic about how AI will transform the labor market.

For one, he doesn't think it's going to replace jobs.

"For the vast majority of jobs, if 20-30% is automated, then what that means is the job is going to be there," Ng said in a recent talk organized by Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. "It also means AI won't replace people, but maybe people that use AI will replace people that don't."

He's also confident that automation is only going to help companies find new opportunities for innovation.

When companies find that they can make a task 1,000 times cheaper through technology like AI, their instinct is not always to revel in the cost savings, he said. Instead, they're likely to invest in executing that task 10,000 more times.

"What I've seen is saving money is nice, but there's only so much money you can save," he said. "But the upside to growth has no limit, no ceiling on that."

Ng has previously said that Big Tech companies are also inflating the threat that AI might pose to humanity in order to dominate the market.

"There are definitely large tech companies that would rather not have to try to compete with open source, so they're creating fear of AI leading to human extinction," Ng told The Australian Review last October. "It's been a weapon for lobbyists to argue for legislation that would be very damaging to the open-source community."