The chief executive of a $350 billion AI startup is sounding the alarm about the exponential pace of AI development, believing that tech will be able to do nearly all human jobs in just a few years.
In a new essay titled The Adolescence of Technology, Dario Amodei says his predicted AI-driven labor market disruption cannot be viewed through the lens of past technological breakthroughs, such as the agricultural or the Internet revolutions.
According to Amodei, the pace of AI progress is at breakneck speed and may continue to accelerate as artificial intelligence agents write code themselves.
“For example, in the last two years, AI models went from barely being able to complete a single line of code, to writing all or almost all of the code for some people—including engineers at Anthropic. Soon, they may do the entire task of a software engineer end-to-end.”
Amodei also notes that the rapid pace of development means that AI will be capable of human-like performance in cognitive abilities, making it very difficult for people to find jobs that they would have been a good fit for.
“For example, the general intellectual abilities required for entry-level jobs in, say, finance, consulting, and law are fairly similar, even if the specific knowledge is quite different. A technology that disrupted only one of these three would allow employees to switch to the two other close substitutes (or for undergraduates to switch majors). But disrupting all three at once (along with many other similar jobs) may be harder for people to adapt to.”
According to Amodei, even new jobs created by AI will be taken over by AI itself. He adds that physical labor won’t be safe either, as AI accelerates the development of robots.
“Another way to say it is that AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”
The Anthropic CEO says economic diffusion is slow and will buy society time to address the labor market disruption. But he warns that at the end of the day, there’s no stopping the AI train.
“I talk to people from a wide variety of enterprises, and there are places where the adoption of AI will take years. That’s why my prediction for 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs being disrupted is 1–5 years, even though I suspect we’ll have powerful AI (which would be, technologically speaking, enough to do most or all jobs, not just entry-level) in much less than 5 years. But diffusion effects merely buy us time. And I am not confident they will be as slow as people predict.”
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