CEO of AI startup Anthropic, Dario Amodei issued a stark warning that AI is going to eliminate 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in the next five years.
Bad news for people who like working to pay for housing, food, and life.
Artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and CEO of AI startup Anthropic, Dario Amodei issued a stark warning that AI is going to eliminate 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in the next five years, and could raise unemployment in the United States to 20%. He noted that the American general public and politicians are unaware, and that society “can’t just sleepwalk into it”.
Is this claim overblown? Is AI really going to disrupt society?
Yes. Absolutely, the robots are coming for our jobs. I see no way around it and anyone who says different either doesn’t know what they’re talking about or is lying. Well, that’s what I believe anyway.
Let’s start with the good news (because my editor says I need to soften the blow). AI will make some jobs easier, more efficient, and less eye-dryingly boring. Imagine if spreadsheets updated themselves. Imagine if you wanted to create an app for your kids and all you had to do was ask an AI program to write it for you. Imagine calling a helpline and getting immediate and relevant help because the call centre is run by helpful AI agents.
This future is already partially here and will be fully embraced in the coming years. So hooray! Things get easier, more functional, and if you were working in that call centre, chances are you’re happy to leave the stressful life of call centre operator and go do anything else (I had a friend who routinely vomited daily before reporting for her job in a call centre).
But now here’s the bad news. AI isn’t just going to take over the boring menial jobs, or the ones where people get verbally abused over the phone. AI is going to be composing music, shooting content for film and TV, analysing court cases, doing your taxes, diagnosing your illness, and possibly very soon, writing the majority of what you read online.
AI has read every book, watched every TED Talk, and knows, or is going to know, how to do everyone’s job. And I’m no exception.
Take Google’s new Veo 3 video generator. It can generate lifelike visuals and native audio. Basically, it’s like having a film crew except that film crew can shoot content anywhere in the world, anywhere in time, anything you can dream up.
As these tools get more complex and targeted to the film and TV industry, it becomes easier to see how the media industry in two to five years will only need a few people at the top to create content. The storytellers.
Everyone else? VFX, gone. The whole crew to light and shoot? Gone. The production assistants running around on set. Gone.
AI-generated video is going to disrupt the mature film and TV markets and level the playing field with the lower budget markets. And this same example is going to happen in all industries AI touches.
This is why Anthropic’s CEO sees AI disrupting entry level jobs. We still need expertise to lead AI. AI can generate content but it will be our human subjectivity that dictates what is good and what isn’t. It’s just that we won’t need as many people as we used to, to get there.
But surely jobs that need a human touch are safe?
Not so much. A new study titled “Is ChatGPT more empathetic than humans?” concluded that ChatGPT responses are rated 10% higher in empathy than human responses. This means AI can emulate empathetic communication. The bedside manner needed to be a doctor? AI can do that. How about having an AI therapist? AI is there. And AI will never get tired of hearing about your problems. It’s good, but also very scary how many of us will fall into the “AI is our best friend” rabbit hole.
So what do we do?
What humans have always done. Adapt. Learn. In the future, jobs perhaps will be less like identities and more like skillsets that some people have or don’t have. Maybe working nine to five until we’re seniors shouldn’t be the goal to begin with. No one really knows, but AI is going to rewrite what it means to live and work.
Above all else, our time as the smartest thing on this planet is coming to an end, so enjoy that while it lasts.
Avid writer Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries and lifestyle programming. Write to him at lifestyle@thestar.com.my and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
