My last post considered the future of Generative AI.
It has become impossible to maintain thinking about AI at the pace of hype speed. While on vacation last week, a couple of new items popped across my screen in the brief times I was online.
These items refer to the relationship of jobs and AI. One is from a pessimist who sees only gloom. This news item from Axios was picked up by MAGA commentator Steve Bannon among others. The fear seems to cross party and demographic lines. The Axios headline (White Collar Bloodbath) was clearly designed for maximum fear leading to clicks and views.
As much as I like Axios as a news source, I continue to detest their click-bait and journalist over-hype headlines. Still, an interview contending the end of entry-level white collar jobs (probably too exaggerated).
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.
Sure, we’ve seen clueless managers mandating programmers use of AI in order to get more work out requiring fewer programmers. Certainly AI is a useful tool for programmers, but it certainly doesn’t replace the vision of what to program and how to best assemble routines.
No good journalist writes a piece with a point-of-view. They must always “balance” views. In this case they quote Sam Altman:
The other side: Amodei started Anthropic after leaving OpenAI, where he was VP of research. His former boss, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, makes the case for realistic optimism, based on the history of technological advancements.
“If a lamplighter could see the world today,” Altman wrote in a September manifesto — sunnily titled “The Intelligence Age” — “he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable.”
Remember that Altman’s job is to project optimism and a profitable future since he’s in capital-raising mode.
Meanwhile, economics Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu challenges the AI revolution narrative with data-driven predictions and business advice. He takes a common sense approach to statistics and analysis similar (but far superior) to what I used back in my analyst days (not working for a firm, but performing analysis for executive decision making). His analysis was reported in the MIT Sloan Management Review.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu challenges the AI revolution narrative with surprising data: AI will likely automate just 5% of tasks and add only 1% to global GDP this decade. And where the internet’s potential was clear early on, AI’s is not, and the technology has yet to deliver applications that can transform production or create valuable new services.
Acemoglu reveals which roles face automation risk while explaining why jobs requiring judgment and social intelligence remain safe. His advice for leaders:
- Resist hype-driven investments and competitive pressure.
- Focus on creating new services, not just cutting costs.
- Use AI to augment human workers, not replace them.
- Partner with skilled employees to identify valuable AI applications.
This research-backed perspective cuts through speculation while acknowledging AI’s potential when it’s deployed strategically.
What he did was step back and look at all jobs, then the percentage that might be affected by AI one way or another and then continue to filter. Rather than “bloodbath”, he looks at sectors that may be affected.
