Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is reiterating his warning that a massive job displacement among knowledge workers is in sight amid the emergence of AI.
In an interview at the 56th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, Amodei says history shows that the labor force has adapted well through past industrial revolutions, from farming to today’s white-collar work.
But this time around, Amodei worries that the pace of AI development will overwhelm the labor market’s ability to adapt, ultimately leaving many people without jobs.
“One to five years as of six months ago, I would stick with that. Connect this to what I said before, which is we might have AI that’s better than humans at everything in maybe one to two years, maybe a little longer than that. Those don’t seem to line up. The reason is that there’s this lag and there’s this replacement thing.
I know that the labor market is adaptable. It’s just like 80% of people used to do farming. Farming got automated, and then they became factory workers, and then knowledge workers. So, there is some level of adaptability here as well. We should be economically sophisticated about how the labor market works.
But my worry is that as this exponential keeps compounding, and I don’t think it’s going to take that long, again, somewhere between a year and five years, it will overwhelm our ability to adapt. I think I may be saying the same thing Demis [Hassabis] is, just factored out of that difference we have about timelines, which I think ultimately comes down to how fast you close the loop on coding.”
Last year, Amodei grabbed headlines after warning that AI would erase half of entry-level, white-collar jobs, pushing the unemployment rate between 10% and 20% within five years. In December, billionaire Howard Marks warned that AI-driven unemployment could trigger widespread purposelessness as people sit around all day doing nothing.
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