Artificial intelligence could spark massive job loss in U.S.: Expert
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Artificial intelligence could sound the death knell for entry-level white-collar jobs while causing U.S. unemployment to rise as high as 20%, the chief executive of a top Al company warned.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose firm built the “Claude” AI chatbot, warned that executives and politicians must stop “sugar-coating” the mass layoffs that could happen in fields such as tech, finance and law.
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“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios in a recent interview, per the New York Post. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
The Anthropic boss said he expects the job market downfall to play out over the next one to five years. At the same time, he said he expects Al to provide massive benefits to the economy and fuel unprecedented advancements in medicine.
“Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs,” said Amodei, describing one potential scenario.
The national unemployment rate in the U.S. currently stands at 4.2%.
Amodei’s most recent warning comes as Anthropic competes in a race with other tech giants such as Google, Meta and OpenAI to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI — which describes an AI model with human-level cognitive capabilities or greater.
Amodei started Anthropic after previously working at OpenAI under its CEO Sam Altman. Amodei is one of several executives who have warned about impending upheaval in the job market.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year discussed how AI was taking on a bigger role in Meta’s workforce.
“Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg said during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Elsewhere, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned in April 2023 that he expected “knowledge workers,” such as writers, accountants, architects and software engineers, to be hit hard by the rise of AI.
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