The dire predictions about the white-collar job market are coming in thick and fast.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI could wipe out half of all white-collar jobs in 1-5 years. He added that this would spike unemployment to 10-20%. Amodei said that people — and governments — weren’t sufficiently prepared for this change.
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. “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it,” he added.
Amodei predicted a future where AI could lead to remarkable breakthroughs, but also completely upend the job market. “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs,” he said, laying out a possible scenario.
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei said. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar. It’s a very strange set of dynamics, where we’re saying: ‘You should be worried about where the technology we’re building is going.”
Amodei isn’t the only tech leader who’s warned about the imminent danger to white-collar jobs from AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI will disrupt white-collar and creative jobs before it moves on to other professions. Atomberg’s Arindam Paul has said that 40-50 percent of white-collar jobs in India could cease to exist because of AI, and an Anthropic researcher had predicted that AI would be able to automate any white-collar job by 2028. Amid all this, Dario Amodei’s prediction of half of entry level white-collar jobs being gone in the next 1-5 years sounds conservative, but like he says, society needs to prepare itself for the massive changes that AI seems set to unleash in the not too distant future.