AI Firm Chief Admits AI Will Kill Jobs

At long last, the CEO of an artificial intelligence (AI) technology provider is acknowledging that his company’s services will contribute to the destruction of American jobs. It’s a dreadful vision of the future, but at least he’s being honest about it.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has some good news and some bad news about what’s coming soon. Amodei told Axios that he sees a scenario in which “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs.”

Apparently, all of this will be the result of advancements in AI technology. Already, I have questions about the optimistic parts of Amodei’s vision.

How can the economy grow at a mind-blowing 10% per year if the populace is underemployed and can’t afford to spend money on goods and services? Also, how can the budget be balanced if so many unemployed people will be “on the dole”?

Call me a pessimist, but I suspect that AI will cause job destruction without somehow miraculously getting Congress to agree on a balanced budget. At the same time, sustained 20% unemployment in America is a terrible scenario; just imagine the jobless rate during the peak of COVID-19, except it would never get any better.

In this scenario, the worst is yet to come for many U.S. workers. To a certain extent, AI technology was designed to assist workers; in the near future, however, there will be a shift from AI helping people to AI replacing people.

What’s the expected timeline for this unfortunate shift? Amodei doesn’t think it will take very long for AI automation technology to replace workers instead of just making their jobs easier. “It’s going to happen in a small amount of time – as little as a couple of years or less,” he predicts.

Now, maybe you’re assuming that workers can escape this fate by brushing up on their AI coding skills. After all, technology firms will still need people to write the code for all of these AI automation programs, right?

Don’t count on it. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in January, “Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.”

Meta Platforms is one of the most important AI technology businesses in America, and it recently disclosed plans to cut its workforce by 5%. Don’t be too surprised, then, if Meta Platforms helps create the technology that will replace AI coders at its own company as well as at other companies.

Courtesy: World Economic Forum

Granted, not everyone’s model of the future is as bleak as what Amodei is presenting. For example, the World Economic Forum imagines that the job market will only be reshaped, not destroyed, and “AI content creators” could thrive amid an AI technology takeover.

But then, Amodei is the chief executive of an AI firm and sees the inner workings of the market on a daily basis. He’s a private-sector AI technology participant and influencer, not just an observer or academic commentator speaking from a distance.

Another private-sector AI tech influencer is former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who earlier this year forecast that AI will replace many doctors and teachers within 10 years. Gates further predicted that, because of AI, humans won’t be needed “for most things.”

Speaking of Microsoft, the company’s AI division CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, admitted that AI technology will have a “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce. Suleyman further added that AI technology tools “are fundamentally labor replacing.”

Thus, Amodei’s stark warning fits with what top-level technology executives in the private sector are saying. The World Economic Forum may see room for “Ethics and Governance Specialists” to thrive in the coming years, but the reality of an automated workforce might not match up to their hope-fueled models.