Head of world's most valuable company advises people to return to factory work: 'Not everyone needs a PhD'
Jensen Huang briefly ditched the black leather jacket he's known for in May to attend an academic event organized by Sweden's Linköping University PHOTO: Jeppe Gustafsson / Shutterstock Editorial / Profimedia Images
The CEO of artificial intelligence chip giant Nvidia, a company valued at $4.53 trillion, says people should go back to working in factories for their prosperity and the country's prosperity, reports Fortune magazine.
His comments come as the United States is in an accelerating race with China in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers and other infrastructure needed to develop AI technologies. At the same time, the revolution brought about by AI makes many “office” workers worry that their jobs will be automated. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is adamant that getting people back to work in factories is critical to success.
“We want to reindustrialize the United States. We need to get back to manufacturing,” Huang said recently on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. “Not every successful person has to have a PhD. Not every successful person has to have made it to Stanford or MIT,” he insisted.
The head of Nvidia says that the industry is essential for any country
Huang believes more Americans need to take factory jobs — not just to gear up for AI-era jobs, but because the entire industry could be at risk. While the idea of people returning to factories may seem like a setback, he says it directly impacts a nation's ability to stay prosperous and build AI companies like his.
“We can't invest in anything, at home or abroad – we can't solve any of our problems. If we don't have energy growth, we can't have industrial growth. If we don't have industrial growth, we can't have job growth. It's that simple,” he continued.
“If it wasn't for his pro-growth energy policy [Trump]we couldn't have built factories for AI, we couldn't have built factories for chips, and we certainly couldn't have built factories for supercomputers. None of this would have been possible without all those measures. Construction jobs would have been affected, electrician jobs — all these jobs that are now booming would have been affected,” Jensen Huang added.
He previously named the electrician job and two others that don't require an advanced degree as ones that will see explosive growth in the coming years as the data centers needed for AI technology are built.
Robots won't make factory jobs disappear, Huang believes
In the new interview with Joe Rogan, the Nvidia boss also said he has hopes for the future of jobs, even in the context of the emergence of robots in the workforce – a development that is already affecting jobs in factories and warehouses.
Some tech leaders like Elon Musk are already developing their own fleets of autonomous workers; Musk predicted that the company's humanoid Optimus robots will be used internally at Tesla by the end of 2025, and the following year, other companies will have access to the technology.
It is assumed that these robots will take over the work of employees, leaving people unemployed, but Huang is optimistic that the technology will create new opportunities, especially for technicians.
“I'm very excited about the robots that Elon is working on. It's still a few years away. When it happens, there's going to be a whole new industry of technicians and people who have to make the robots,” Huang said on the podcast.
“You're going to have a whole industry of 'clothing' for robots. You're going to have mechanics for robots. And you're going to have people coming to maintain your robots,” he opined.
