Even the people leading the companies that are bringing about the AI revolution feel that their own jobs could one day be taken by AI.
Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann has said that he believes that even he is not immune to having his job replaced by AI. “Even for me — I’m in the center of a lot of this transformation — I’m not immune from job replacement either. At some point, it’s coming for all of us,” he said on a podcast.
Mann gave examples of jobs that were already being impacted by AI. “To cite a couple of areas where things are changing quite quickly, in customer service, with Fin and Intercom — they’re a great partner of ours — they have 82% customer service resolution rates automatically without a human involved. In software engineering, our Claude Code team, 95% of the code is written by Claude. A different way to phrase that is that we write 10x or 20x more code, so a much smaller team can be much more impactful,” he said. In May, Anthropic’s lead engineer Boris Cherny had said that 80% of Claude Code’s code was written by Claude Code, and that seems to have increased to 95% over the last four months.
“And similarly for customer service, yes you can phrase it 82% customer service resolution rates, but that nets out in the humans doing those tasks to be able to focus on the harder part of those tasks. And for the more tricky situations that five years ago, they would’ve just had to drop those tickets, because it was too much effort for them to actually go do an investigation because were too many other tickets for them to worry about,” he said, hinting that companies will be able to do tasks that they were previously unable to. “I think in the immediate term, there will be a massive expansion of the pie, and the amount of labour people can do,” Mann said.
Mann though did say that while the scope of work that companies could do would increase, there would be some disruption to jobs. “With lower skill jobs, or (jobs with) less headroom on how good they can be, I think there will be a lot of displacement. It’s just something that we as a society have to get ahead of and work on,” he added.