Media Cycles, AI Unemployment, and Dario Amodei
Yesterday, the story of Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei’s claim in a recent Axios interview that AI could wipe out half of entry-level jobs and drive unemployment to 20% started to go viral.
Why is everyone so surprised?
In a March interview at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said it will eventually be able to do all jobs and that we need to find ways to value ourselves beyond thinking about the economically productive work we do.
What Amodei is sharing is also not a radical idea.
In 2022, Sam Altman predicted that AI would be able to do the jobs of all digital workers.
In 2025, Dr. Ben Goertzel said even if we never move beyond LLMs, we’ll be able to automate 70-80% of human labor, as most people do not do anything especially creative at work.
In 2024, Elon Musk said people can have a job if they want to have a job
Over the last few years, Geoff Hinton has been claiming that AI will automate nearly all jobs.
Today, Brad Lightcap, the COO of OpenAI, made a similar point.
Experts discussed the coming umemployment wave recently on the Diary of a CEO.
We already see taxi/ride-share drivers, translators, image designers, programmers, and customer service agents being replaced and/or seeing significantly diminished wages.
New college grads are struggling in the “entry level” job market.
Yes, lots of people are going to lose jobs to AI. Lots of people aren’t going to get jobs because AI can do what they trained todo.
We can keep pretending that AI can’t do what we do at work — jobs for others—or we can accept the reality that it can and start preparing students to be entrepreneurs who manage teams of AIs to generate revenue.
Let’s make this more concrete: Even under conservative time-lines, this is the world this year’s college seniors will join when they graduate from college. And, like we’re seeing, it’s not going to happen all at once.