AI could erase half of entry-level white collar jobs in 5 years, CEO warns
Just one week after Anthropic released its most advanced AI models to date, Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in an interview with Axios about the future of jobs in an AI-centric world.
The replacement
AI could be responsible for eliminating half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — while spiking unemployment to 10-20% — in the next one to five years, Amodei said in the interview.
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His motivation for speaking up, Amodei said, is to help people prepare adequately and encourage AI companies and the government to be candid about the change. “Most of them [workers] are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
When will AI transition from augmenting to automating people’s roles? Amodei said it could happen as soon as two years from now. In particular, he warned how this transition threatens the balance of democracy and wealth when the average person’s inability to create economic value leads to increased inequality.
In light of this risk, the question becomes: Why not apply the brakes to this accelerating AI arms race with all these companies competing to reach AGI, or human-level intelligence? The answer is a familiar one: There is a market demand for the technology. If US development slowed down due to regulation, China would simply leapfrog us.
The outlook isn’t all dark, and Amodei still has hope.
The bigger picture
The same reality in which AI would replace jobs would also exist in which AI makes several meaningful advances in other sectors, such as health care.
Even as AI replaces jobs, the same technology also enables meaningful advances in various sectors, including health care.
“Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs,” Amodei noted in his conversation with Axios.
He also proposed tangible solutions, including spreading public awareness of the incoming change so that people could reflect on the future of their career paths and perhaps avoid the most vulnerable jobs.
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A helpful resource for accomplishing this is the Anthropic Economic Index, which tracks different uses of AI, whether augmenting or completely replacing workers, and the occupations related to the work. When the index was first released in February, it found that AI use leaned more toward augmentation (57%), enhancing human processes.
AI literacy is another pillar of Amodei’s solutions, with emphasis on teaching people how AI can augment their work so they are prepared to navigate the transition. However, during a press-only session during Code with Claude, where ZDNET was in attendance, Amodei shared that there is a “rising waterline” in augmenting versus replacing use cases, making augmentative solutions short-term strategies.
“When I think about how to make things more augmentative, that is a strategy for the short and the medium term — in the long term, we are all going to have to contend with the idea that everything humans do is eventually going to be done by AI systems. This is a constant. This will happen,” said Amodei.
Amodei’s other proposed solutions involved policymakers, with a call to better inform public officials and to start thinking of policy solutions in an economy where superintelligence is a reality.
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While Amodei’s predictions can be off-putting, every digital transformation leads to a workforce transformation, with some jobs displaced as other jobs are created. Some research shows that coexistence between AI and humans is possible, as the technology actually highlights a need for human skills.
Either way, one truth still holds: AI upskilling is as critical as ever.
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