Microsoft's Brad Smith on AI-era jobs: "Let's not panic"

Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, slammed tech moguls for hypocritical, grandiose warnings that are alienating Americans at a time of huge workforce opportunity.

• "Nobody knows for sure, but let's not panic," Smith, who has been with Microsoft for 33 years, said from the tech giant's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Why it matters: Smith is among the tech leaders who think dire predictions about AI's threat to entry-level white-collar jobs are souring young Americans on a miraculous technology.

Smith writes in a new paper about AI's effect on jobs that AI getting booed at this spring's commencements should be a "powerful wake-up call for the tech sector."

• "Hopefully, leaders across our industry will listen and seek to learn from this reaction," Smith writes. "For the past half-century, the youngest generation of people and workers has led the way in adopting new digital technologies. ... When people who use a new technology complain about it, we had better take notice."

In our interview, Smith said tech leaders have botched the conversation about AI and jobs:

1. Hypocritical warnings: In an essay this month, Anthropic pointed to benefits of slowing AI development "to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications" — a so-called global pause. Smith told me: "If somebody says, 'This technology is so powerful that we need a global treaty to slow it down,' then I would say: Then take your foot off the accelerator yourself if you think it's moving too fast."
2. Scaring grads: Echoing points Jim VandeHei and I made in our recent "Rattled Generation" column, Smith pointed out that this year's graduates were in high school during COVID and have done much of their socializing through screens, against a backdrop of political turmoil. "Now, they finally get to enter the workforce and here comes AI?" he said. "Too often, this is being presented to them as something that is going to happen to them, not for them. And I think this is their way of saying: 'Wait a second. Not so fast. We have a voice. We want to be heard.'"
3. Short-term distortion: "This is going to unfold over 25 years, not two-and-a-half," Smith said. "But look, if you're trying to raise money as entrepreneurs need to do, it's easier to raise money if people think it's going to happen sooner rather than later. But we spend a lot of time studying the history of technology. Twenty-five years for complete transformation of an economy would be a record setter."
4. Unrealistic hype: "Tech leaders tend to repeat two mistakes," he said. "One is: They overestimate the impact of technology, especially the pace at which it will arrive. And second: The tech leaders often underestimate people. ... There was a time when humanity discovered that a horse could run faster than a person. So, people learned how to ride horses. Let's use AI to help people do more and not replace us."
5. Fake certainty: "You find that the same folks who made the wrong predictions a decade ago keep making them with extraordinary conviction," Smith said. "And it makes great fodder for people who generate stories for a living."
6. Hollow calls for regulation: He said we're seeing a flashback to the past decade's debates about social media legislation. "You had some companies that said, 'We want legislation,' and then they basically opposed every bill in Congress because they never liked it specifically." He said that on AI policy, beware "ideas that are so grandiose that the chance of them being adopted is zero."

The bottom line: The AI debate has been "too focused on grandiose predictions," Smith said, "and not centered enough in: Let's use technology, as we always have, to help people do better things."

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