When These Guys Tell You AI is Coming for Your Job, Believe Them
Recently the heads of the major frontier AI labs—and CEO’s of some of the world’s biggest companies—have all been issuing the same warning: AI is going to take your job. Well, maybe not your job, but certainly lots of jobs.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman minced no words when he told MIT President Sally Kornbluth, “This is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs.” That was in May 2024, but he was only echoing entailments he had expressed in 2023 at the WSJ Tech Live event.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that AI could take half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and that 10%-20% unemployment is one possible scenario. He went on to say that people don’t believe it because “it sounds crazy”.
Inc. magazine says Amodei is wrong—it will be even worse than he predicts, and that those most threatened are “the $200,000-a-year senior managers who spend most of their time preparing decks, managing spreadsheets, and writing jargon-loaded analyses.”
But it’s not just the heads of AI companies who are making this prediction. From a recent Wall Street Journal article:
”’Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,’ Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival. ‘AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.’”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claims that AI is already doing 30%-50% of the work at his company. But his ultimate goal isn’t to reduce his own costs; it’s to capture a slice of the $12 trillion that could be shifted from the labor market to AI spending.
Make no mistake. This is happening.