Technology 5 min read By Arthur Ellington
Robotics chief urges graduates to engage with AI rather than fear it
The head of an autonomous robot company tells young people that opting out of the AI debate risks leaving them behind, arguing that past technological shifts displaced jobs but ultimately created more rewarding work.
Young people entering the workforce should learn how artificial intelligence works and help shape its development rather than sit on the sidelines, according to the head of a company that builds autonomous robots. In a message addressed to his daughters and to graduates more broadly, the executive warned that letting hype or fear dictate their response to AI could prove a costly lapse in judgment.
The intervention comes as debates over AI polarise university campuses and newsrooms. Students have heard from professors about new AI policies, alongside claims that the technology is destroying the college experience or, at the other extreme, that it threatens human extinction. The same technology is also promoted as a cure for cancer and global poverty. That contradictory noise has convinced many graduates that AI is malignant or dangerously unpredictable, the executive said.
He argued that some of the most prominent commentators on AI, including Nobel laureates, have also been among the most mistaken about its trajectory. As the operator of a company deploying autonomous robots, he acknowledged a clear commercial stake in the debate, but said that running such a business also exposes him to the practical trade-offs at street level. Robots, he noted, are not omniscient. They frequently encounter situations they cannot handle alone and sometimes run into glass walls. Yet they also allow humans to take on more rewarding work.
The central claim is that the current wave of automation follows a pattern established over more than a century. Major breakthroughs have repeatedly sparked fears of mass job loss, only to be followed by rising productivity, higher incomes, entirely new categories of work and sustained growth in gross domestic product. Two hundred years ago, most people would have been subsistence farmers. Today, only 2% of Americans work in agriculture. Farming jobs disappeared as fertilisers, combines and other technologies raised productivity, but hunger fell to unprecedented levels, food prices dropped, life expectancy rose and new industries absorbed displaced workers.
Even as roughly 90% of jobs were displaced over that period, the total number of jobs in the United States rose from 44 million in 1920 to 167 million in 2024, growing faster than the population, while unemployment remained broadly stable for most of the century. A century ago, only about 2 million workers, or 5% of the workforce, held professional and managerial roles. Today that figure stands at almost 60 million people, or 35% of the workforce.
The executive pointed to the rise of social media influencers as an example of work that previous generations could not have imagined. Around 50 million people worldwide now earn money in that field, with 6.5 million making $100,000 a year or more. He predicted that AI will follow a similar path: some jobs will vanish, most will be transformed, and many new roles will emerge, including ones that cannot yet be imagined. Future generations, he suggested, will regard much of today's drudgery with disbelief, just as people now view lamp lighters, elevator operators and human alarm clocks.
Tens of thousands of Americans already work directly in robotics, with many more employed in the AI, engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and operations services that surround the sector. The company operates more than 2,000 robots across 20 cities, and its human workforce grows alongside the robot fleet because the machines require human support. One employee, a former delivery driver, retrained as a robotics field technician after his previous work dried up. The jobs created in this area, the executive said, offer better pay and safer conditions than the gig work they replace.
His advice to young people is to educate themselves about AI, question it and find new ways to use it for problems worth solving. The future of the technology, he concluded, will not simply happen to society. It will be built by those who choose to participate.
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