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.