Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said last week that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and cause unemployment to skyrocket to as high as 20 percent.
Rob Atkinson writes in the Wall Street Journal that he should know better—as should many other serious academics, who have been warning for years that AI will mean the end of employment as we know it. In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of Oxford University produced a research paper estimating that 47 percent of U.S. employment was at risk of being eliminated by new technologies.
Before we resign ourselves to obsolescence at the hands of our new robot overlords, we’d do well to recognize that humans have experienced technological disruptions before, and we adapted to meet them. AI won’t be any different.
Related to this, Atkinson argues in an In the Arena commentary that it would actually be a good thing if 50 percent of American jobs automated over the next decade or so.
