AXIOS ON THE AI JOBS DANGER: Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath.
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:
- AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.
- Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop “sugar-coating” what’s coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.
Why it matters: Amodei, 42, who’s building the very technology he predicts could reorder society overnight, said he’s speaking out in hopes of jarring government and fellow AI companies into preparing — and protecting — the nation.
Few are paying attention. Lawmakers don’t get it or don’t believe it. CEOs are afraid to talk about it. Many workers won’t realize the risks posed by the possible job apocalypse — until after it hits.
- “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told us. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
The big picture: President Trump has been quiet on the job risks from AI. But Steve Bannon — a top official in Trump’s first term, whose “War Room” is one of the most powerful MAGA podcasts — says AI job-killing, which gets virtually no attention now, will be a major issue in the 2028 presidential campaign.
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“I don’t think anyone is taking into consideration how administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 — entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s — are going to be eviscerated,” Bannon told us.
In his 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist, James Pethokoukis predicted:
What are the best current guesses for AI’s impact? Goldman Sachs, a bank, finds a third of tasks that make up nearly a thousand U.S. occupations are exposed to the current state of AI automation. That translates to some two-thirds of all occupations. But that doesn’t mean two-thirds of all jobs are going away. Some occupations are more exposed than others. GS economists see a high level of exposure in administrative and legal jobs, low exposure in “physically intensive” jobs such as construction and maintenance. Overall, the bank’s assumptions would mean 7 percent of current U.S. employment being substituted by AI, 63 percent being complemented, and 30 percent being unaffected. But not even a megabank knows for sure.
Of course, AI will only become more capable. Maybe the reassuring story that history tells us about automation (machines destroy jobs but, eventually, create more new ones) will be a poor guide going forward. But that’s not my baseline case. In his 2022 paper “The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty,” MIT economist David Autor offers a cautiously optimistic prediction on continued human employment (although he includes a caveat that tech progress faster than what current experts predict could make his forecasts too rosy). Even if AI ends up replacing far more of what humans do than augmenting what they do best—making those tasks more valuable—or creating new things to do, the economy’s increased productivity could be such that average wages would rise. Workers would get less of the economic pie, but the pie would be bigger. Without the emergence of human-like artificial general intelligence, Autor sees an upper limit to the automation process. He thinks humans will continue to have a “comparative advantage” in a number of areas: creativity, judgment, hypothesis formation, contextual thinking, causal analysis, communication, emotional intelligence—“the importance of which we likely do not fully appreciate and the difficulty of which we surely vastly underestimate.” Autor is also confident that the most skilled workers “will likely continue to be complemented by advances in computing and AI—such as workers who invent, design, research, lead, entertain, and educate.”
The next obvious question is what humans will do for work if AGI is reached, which some experts are predicting could happen by 2040, if not earlier. Again, history should be the baseline here. We always overstate the impact of technology on jobs. Who would guess that just one of the 270 jobs in the 1950 U.S. census has been eliminated by automation?52 And who would guess further that job is elevator operator? Beyond looking at history, it’s hard to say what comes next for workers. And that’s OK. “The limits of both our collective knowledge and our individual imaginations constrain well-intentioned efforts to plan for the workforce of the future,” Adam Thierer, a policy analyst, observes. It’s always been easier to recognize which current jobs can be automated than to envision the jobs and industries that don’t exist yet but will be created by new technologies.
We’ve been here before of course; in 1995, lefty futurist Jeremy Rifkin wrote The End of Work, where “Rifkin predicted that automation, mechanization, and computerization would cause massive unemployment within America in the near future. Reality check: Unemployment is lower [in 2004] than it was in 1995. A columnist for the Financial Post remarked in 2003: ‘Who can forget the jeremiads of that great intellectual flim-flam man, Jeremy Rifkin, whose book, The End of Work, said it all. And what ensued? The greatest bout of job creation in post-war history!’”
Of course, one reason why Web publications such as Axios fear a “white collar bloodbath” is how recent AI trends are effecting their industry: Business Insider axing 21% of workforce as AI sends web search traffic plunging.
Business Insider is laying off about 21% of its workforce, an internal memo showed on Thursday, as the financial news outlet grapples with shrinking search traffic and the growing use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.
The New York-based company joins several digital media companies in restructuring operations as consumers increasingly depend on artificial intelligence for news synopsis, which is eating into web traffic.
In the memo, CEO Barbara Peng told staff the company now generates twice as much revenue for each website visit as it did two years ago, but 70% of its business still has some degree of traffic sensitivity.
“We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control, so we’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility,” Peng said in the memo seen by Reuters.
The New York-based company is accelerating adoption of AI, with a majority of employees already utilizing Enterprise ChatGPT and several AI-driven products to enhance operations and reader experience, Peng said.
In December of 2002, Virginia Postrel noted the disconnect between a remarkably mild (considering what had just happened in September of 2001) recession and how it was being reported by the legacy media:
In today’s NYT, Dan Akst puts the current economic gloominess in perspective, reminding us that even in the current slump the economy looks more like an earlier era’s dream than the nightmare too often portrayed in media account. By historical standards, things are looking awfully good: “low interest rates, affordable energy, full employment without inflation and broad access to home ownership.” We’ve even learned to compete with the Japanese. Why the disconnect? One reason “may be the sharp advertising downturn that started in early 2001. The resulting media recession, including layoffs and other cutbacks, has produced a grimmer-than-usual attitude in the perennially gloomy fourth estate. The industry’s concentration in New York and Washington, both of which were struck by terrorists last year, has further darkened the industry’s outlook.” Dan is no outsider taking cheap shots at reporters. He’s a long-time journalist acknowledging a psychological truth: We all grant more salience to facts we experience directly. And journalists know lots and lots of people who’ve lost jobs in this recession.
The legacy media’s fear of what AI will do to their profession is driving a lot of their more feverish nightmare scenarios for the world at large.
