Jeff Bezos praised President Donald Trump and hyped up AI during a Wednesday interview. “Trump has lots of good ideas, and he’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due,” the Amazon founder said.
“I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term,” Bezos said of President Trump during an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin.
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“Trump has lots of good ideas, and he’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due,” the Amazon founder continued.
Bezos went on to position his efforts as nonpartisan, telling Sorkin, “I’ve worked with all the presidents, I will work with all the presidents, and I hope to do that going forward, if they’ll have me.”
“We need our business leaders to provide input into the administration, regardless of who the president is,” he added. “I’m on the side of America. That is so important, and that’s where business leaders should be.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Bezos discussed artificial intelligence, noting, “There’s so many people who are afraid that AI is going to take their job,” but that he believes there will actually be “a labor shortage as a result.”
Bezos went on to describe what he thinks the benefits of AI will be, saying, “The analogy I can give you is: You’ve been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel, and somebody is about to hand you a bulldozer.”
“You should be so happy if you’re digging the basement to your house and somebody says, ‘Hey, how about this?’” the Blue Origin founder added. “What’s really going to happen is we’re going to have so much productivity in our economy.”
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Bezos even predicted that another positive “effect” of AI would be American households going back to single-income status.
“A lot of people who have two-earner income households, one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce — that’s why we’re going to have a labor shortage,” the Washington Post owner said.
“Because of the productivity gains, you’re going to be able to afford things,” Bezos continued. “I predict we’ll actually have deflation — assuming we let this technology play out and don’t hamstring it with regulation too early.”
In offering Sorkin “a different lens to view this,” the billionaire added, “If I’m a software engineer, I need to uplevel and think: ‘What am I really doing? What does a good computer scientist software engineer do?’”
“What we really do, is we identify problems and we help solve them,” Bezos said. “And the code is almost just a piece of execution that helps with that. But the real job is going to be identifying problems and helping to solve them.”
“And that’s not going to go away,” he added. “That’s the kind of thing that humans are going to be good at — and they’re going to work with that tool [AI] to build the system.”
“We humans are never going to run out of problems, and we’re never going to run out of the need for solutions,” Bezos asserted. “It’s just that the work is going to be done at a higher level. It’s going to be done with a bulldozer instead of a shovel.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.