Reed Hastings

Good for humanity, but not good for radiologists.

Well, what happened is as radiology got better because of AI analysis that helped radiologists, the price of scans went down and the number of scans turned out to be hugely elastic.

Now you walk in, you've got a cough, boom, you get a scan.

And so what's happened now is there's about 34,000 radiologists in the US, which is a shortage.

We now have a labor shortage of radiologists.

by about 5,000.

So it's an incredible story of, of course, elasticity of demand to improve lives, i.e.

more scans.

And so we may well see with AI that it makes Wall Street analysts more productive, it makes software engineers more productive, and that, in fact, the elasticity

and that we grow the economy.

And when people ask, you know, we're spending collectively as an industry a half a trillion dollars on AI data center, how is that ever going to get paid back?

Well, you know, add one or two points to GDP growth and it gets paid back fast.

So, you know, I don't want to like guarantee that it's always going to be like radiology.

I do think software engineering is particularly fascinating because all the major AI companies are working on it.

And so it is the white-collar canary in the coal mine.

And if software engineering jobs go down a lot over the next five years, then that's probably going to happen to law and architecture and many other things.

If, in fact, because of the increased productivity, people are building a lot more software, sort of the radiology example, then I think in many professions we will see a big expansion and we can be more confident of the high productivity.

None of that really answers the long-term question that you asked, which is, how are we not the Neanderthals?

So I think reasonable chance, high productivity rather than mass unemployment.

But then ultimately, what if they're smarter and smarter and smarter than us?