Spinning a good narrative is critical to selling artificial intelligence these days. But the leaders of today’s biggest labs are giving us whiplash by changing their stories on employment. The most likely outcome is neither a job apocalypse nor productivity utopia, but something harder to measure: a quiet degradation of the quality of the jobs that remain.
Last year, Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei warned AI would eliminate more than 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Now, he’s saying it’ll make everyone more productive. “If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job,” he told JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on stage at an Anthropic event last month. “And the 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do.”
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has also walked back his doom mongering. Having warned last year of a similar cleaving to the job market, he said in May that he’d been “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.