By Stacy Johnson CPA
Publication Date: 2026-08-18 10:00:00
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a message for anyone worried about AI taking their job: relax. He recently told Axios that fears of a jobs bloodbath are “complete nonsense,” and that “AI is creating an enormous number of jobs, not taking it away.” (1)
Maybe he’s right. I hope he is.
But I was a stockbroker from 1981 to 1991, which means I spent the entire Rust Belt collapse watching the stock market climb to record after record. Just like it is today.
For example, in 1979, General Motors employed about 80,000 people around Flint, Michigan, and the city had nearly the second-highest average pay in America — roughly $90,000 a year in today’s dollars. Today GM employs about 7,600 in Flint, and countywide income has fallen to about half the state average. (2)
Of long-tenured workers who lost jobs in Flint and later found full-time work again, 36% ended up earning at least 20% less than before. (3)
The auto industry is the single biggest user of factory robots, and economists found each new robot erased about 5.6 jobs in the surrounding community. (4)
Did America lose jobs overall during those years? No. As autoworkers lost jobs, new work sprouted everywhere — in offices and information services. On paper, no net loss.
But a new information job in California was of no…
