As AI models get rapidly more capable, the predictions on when they’ll completely disrupt white-collar jobs are getting more aggressive.
Sholto Douglas, a researcher at Anthropic, has put forth a bold claim: AI models will be capable of automating any white-collar job by 2028. Douglas’s prediction, made during a recent discussion, highlights the rapid advancements in AI capabilities and underscores the potential for widespread economic disruption in the coming years.
“I think we’re near guaranteed at this point to have effectively models that are capable of automating any white collar job by 2027, 2028 or near guaranteed end of decade,” he said.
Douglas clarifies the reasoning behind this prediction: “That being said, that’s because those tasks are quite susceptible to our current suite of algorithms. You can try things on computers many times. There’s a wealth of data available for this. The internet exists. But that same resource of data doesn’t exist for, say, robotics or for biology.”
He explains the difference in AI progress across different fields: “For a model to be a superhuman coder, you just need the affordances which we’ve already been able to give the models, and you need to take these existing elements and scale it up. For a model to be a super human biological researcher, you need automated laboratories where it’s able to propose and run experiments, or for it to become as competent in the real world as we are, you need it to be able to act in the robotics and you need a lot of robots for actually collect the data,” he says.
Douglas also highlights a potential mismatch and a resulting worry: “One mismatch that I think we might see, and I’m actually also worried about seeing, is you’ll see a huge impact on white collar work. And whether that looks like just dramatic augmentation, we’ll get to know, but you will see that will change a lot. And we’ll need to pull forward the dramatic transformation of things that make our lives a lot better.”
The implications of such a sweeping transformation are significant. The white-collar sector, encompassing roles from marketing and finance to customer service and software development, represents a substantial portion of the global workforce. Widespread automation in these areas could lead to mass unemployment, requiring a fundamental rethinking of social safety nets, education systems, and the very nature of work.
Anthropic isn’t the only company that’s saying that white-collar jobs could be impacted with AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI will disrupt white-collar and creative jobs first. Atomberg’s Arindam Paul has said that 45-50 percent of all white-collar of jobs in India could cease to exist because of AI. And with Anthropic researchers putting the timeline as little as three years away to complete automation, societies could need to quickly recalibrate how they approach work and salaries in the age of AI.