Jeff Bezos says AI will cause labour shortages, not mass unemployment, and outlines space colony vision at VivaTech Paris

AI optimism in Paris

Jeff Bezos appeared on stage at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Wednesday with a forceful counter-narrative to the prevailing anxiety about AI and jobs. He rejected the view that intelligent machines will displace human workers on a large scale, telling the audience that humanity faces a future of labour scarcity caused by the technology.

I know there's a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on. I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labour shortage.

He argued that people have an “endless” number of tasks to accomplish and that the real constraint is not ambition but existing barriers that AI will lower. His comments come as a Reuters/Ipsos poll this month shows half of Americans fear that AI could cost them or a household member their job.

The Prometheus bet

Bezos used the stage to discuss his new AI venture, Prometheus, founded in 2024 and already valued at $41 billion with 150 employees spread across three countries. The startup is aiming for a $100 billion fundraising round, according to a Spanish technology report.

Rather than building language models, Prometheus focuses on what Bezos calls “AI that does things, not just knows things”. The system is designed to assist engineers through the entire manufacturing cycle: initial design, simulation, prototyping, fabrication and launch. Bezos said the goal was to “empower” human engineers, not replace them, and framed the moment as a new golden age for founding a company.

Space: restoring a garden planet

Bezos devoted significant time to his space company Blue Origin, appearing alongside its CEO David Limp. He described a long-term ambition to move all polluting industries off Earth so that the planet can be restored to a pre-industrial state.

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.

He said that the Moon would be the first permanent off-world settlement, with technologies like electrolysis enabling rockets to refuel using lunar resources. “We’re going to the Moon to stay, not just to visit,” he added.

Recovering from a gut punch

The optimistic space vision was set against the reality of a recent setback. In May a New Glenn rocket exploded during a ground test at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Bezos called the incident a “gut punch” for the team, but Limp confirmed that reconstruction of the launch pad has already begun. Blue Origin’s staff spontaneously printed T-shirts reading “It’s worth it” within 24 hours of the accident, Bezos noted.

Counterpoints and the labour debate

Not everyone shares Bezos’s techno-optimism. Former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, now an adviser to Microsoft and Anthropic, recently said AI was already hurting young people’s job prospects. The UK’s Trades Union Congress has warned that AI could repeat “the disaster of deindustrialisation” with shareholders capturing the gains while workers are displaced.

Bezos acknowledged the tension but insisted that AI will uncover more problems for humans to solve, not fewer. The timeline below puts the latest space and AI milestones in context.