Innovation4 min(s) read
Published 15:15 03 Jul 2026 GMT
Mark Zuckerberg has pushed back against Bill Gates' prediction that only four careers will not be replaced by AI.
The Meta CEO offered an optimistic outlook on the future during a live interview on Complex's Idea Generation platform.
The 42-year-old argued that job losses are not inevitable if artificial intelligence is developed to help people rather than replace them.
"I think that people assume that that's inevitability. I don't actually think it is," he said.
The Facebook founder argued that the direction AI takes will depend on how companies choose to develop it.
Rather than focusing on replacing workers with automation, he said businesses should prioritize what he called "personal super intelligence" to make individuals more productive.
He also warned that a future dominated by only a handful of companies automating knowledge work would not be the best outcome.
"If you have a balance where some companies are focused on making it so that companies can work more efficiently, but others are focused on more of this personal super intelligence vision where you're like empowering individuals and making people more productive at each step along the way, then I think it's probably going to be pretty good," he said.
"If you focus on empowering people and making people more productive and that happens at a faster rate than companies get better at automating things, then in theory there should be more jobs in the future, not less," he added.
Zuckerberg's comments come in response to Gates' recent predictions about which professions are least likely to be replaced by AI.
Speaking to The Indian Express, the Microsoft co-founder argued that careers requiring creativity, innovation, and complex problem-solving remain relatively safe.
He also said biologists will continue to play an important role because scientific breakthroughs still rely on human intuition and original thinking, even if AI helps examine data.
He also believes programmers and energy experts have skills that AI cannot yet fully replicate.
During a separate appearance with Jimmy Fallon, Gates suggested that professional athletes are also unlikely to be replaced.
"You know, like baseball. We won't want to watch computers play baseball," he said in a separate appearance with Jimmy Fallon.
"So there'll be some things that we reserve for ourselves, but in terms of making things and moving things, and growing food, over time, those will be basically solved problems," he added.
Not everyone shares Zuckerberg's optimism, as a Microsoft study published last year identified 40 occupations with the highest overlap with AI tools, although senior Microsoft researcher Kiran Tomlinson later clarified to Sky News that the research examined "which job categories can productively use AI chatbots, not take away or replace jobs."
Among the professions with the highest AI overlap were interpreters and translators (98 percent), historians (91 percent), mathematicians (91 percent), proofreaders (91 percent), automatic machine coders (90 percent), writers and authors (85 percent), statistical assistants (85 percent), sales representatives (84 percent), technical writers (83 percent) and journalists (81 percent).
Meanwhile, AI researcher Dr Roman Yampolskiy predicted in an interview with podcaster Steven Bartlett that artificial general intelligence could arrive within the next 12 months.
He also claimed that when combined with advances in humanoid robotics, "it makes no sense to hire humans for most jobs."
"In five years all the physical labour can also be automated," he added.
"So we're looking at a world where we have levels of unemployment we never seen before...Not talking about 10 percent unemployment which is scary but 99 percent."
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