Jeff Bezos Makes Shocking AI Prediction and the Future of Jobs

Well, let me start by saying that was a rough moment. Nobody likes that. It was a gut punch for the whole team. But what we've learned since then is we got really lucky. Some of the long lead items on the launch infrastructure were preserved. For example, the propellant tank farm, all the liquid hydrogen, liquefied natural gas, liquid oxygen, all those tanks. Those are very long lead items and they were fortunately undamaged. The booster we had in the integration facility, which is right there at the launchpad, various pieces of shrapnel missed the booster. There was a lot of good luck in that incident.

And so, by the way, by the end of that incident, within 24 hours, completely spontaneously, the Blue Origin team, and this is a team of just incredible people, they were making themselves t-shirts that say, 'It's worth it.'

Yeah. And so, the cycle time to the moon, the cadence to the moon is going to increase.

Well, moon first. Moon first. And then Mars.

And we'll build large, Jerry O'Neill style colonies in space, as well. And we'll use near-Earth objects and the moon to build compute in space and solar cells in space. A lot of our compute will be done in space. It'll make more sense. Ultimately we even manufacture the chips that the compute runs on, and the answers can just be beamed back to us here. This planet, Dave said it before, but our long-term vision, our dream, is that all the polluting industry can be done off Earth. If space travel gets reliable enough and inexpensive enough, and we can get materials from asteroids and near Earth objects and the moon, then this garden planet can be returned to its pre-industrial revolution state.

That and the importance of AI and engineering for Blue Origin and for the world.

So, if you think about today, there's a kind of a dream build cycle. You dream of something, and depending on how complicated it is, it may take a few years to 10 years before you're really producing it at rate and manufacturing it. If you take a step back, all of civilizational wealth is driven by invention. 6,000 years ago somebody invented the plow and we all got wealthier. Then much later somebody invented the steam engine and we all got wealthier. This cycle continues. If we can accelerate that dream build cycle, it will create real productivity, real prosperity. That's the idea behind Prometheus. Models have a place, but I know there's a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant. I totally disagree with this point of view. I think AI is going to create a labor shortage because it's going to make it possible for people to identify more problems. We have an endless set of things to invent. We are limited today not by our imaginations, but by what we can actually do. I promise you every single person in this audience has had an idea for a new business or a new product or a new device that they wish they could manufacture, and that idea stayed in your head and went nowhere. The reason it stayed in your head and went nowhere is because it's too hard to do, and it wasn't worth it. If we can accelerate the dream build loop, all of the ideas will then become possible. Then we end up being limited not by our capabilities, but by our imaginations.

Thanks, Mike.

Thank you.