CNN Challenges Claim AI Will Eliminate Half of White-Collar Jobs, Calls It 'Part of the AI Hype Machine' (cnn.com) 40
Thursday Anthropic's CEO/cofounder Dario Amodei again warned unemployed could spike 10 to 20% within the next five years as AI potentially eliminated half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
But CNN's senior business writer dismisses that as "all part of the AI hype machine," pointing out that Amodei "didn't cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate." And that was just one of many of the wild claims he made that are increasingly part of a Silicon Valley script: AI will fix everything, but first it has to ruin everything. Why? Just trust us.
In this as-yet fictional world, "cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don't have jobs," Amodei told Axios, repeating one of the industry's favorite unfalsifiable claims about a disease-free utopia on the horizon, courtesy of AI. But how will the US economy, in particular, grow so robustly when the jobless masses can't afford to buy anything? Amodei didn't say... Anyway. The point is, Amodei is a salesman, and it's in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it's scary. Axios framed Amodei's economic prediction as a "white-collar bloodbath."
Even some AI optimists were put off by Amodei's stark characterization. "Someone needs to remind the CEO that at one point there were more than (2 million) secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in office dictation," wrote tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Bluesky. "They were the original white collar displacements. New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment."
Little of what Amodei told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropic's work, days after it released a major model update to its Claude chatbot, one of the top rivals to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Amodei told CNN Thursday this great societal change would be driven by how incredibly fast AI technology is getting better and better — and that the AI boom "is bigger and it's broader and it's moving faster than anything has before...!"
But CNN's senior business writer dismisses that as "all part of the AI hype machine," pointing out that Amodei "didn't cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate." And that was just one of many of the wild claims he made that are increasingly part of a Silicon Valley script: AI will fix everything, but first it has to ruin everything. Why? Just trust us.
In this as-yet fictional world, "cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don't have jobs," Amodei told Axios, repeating one of the industry's favorite unfalsifiable claims about a disease-free utopia on the horizon, courtesy of AI. But how will the US economy, in particular, grow so robustly when the jobless masses can't afford to buy anything? Amodei didn't say... Anyway. The point is, Amodei is a salesman, and it's in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it's scary. Axios framed Amodei's economic prediction as a "white-collar bloodbath."
Even some AI optimists were put off by Amodei's stark characterization. "Someone needs to remind the CEO that at one point there were more than (2 million) secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in office dictation," wrote tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Bluesky. "They were the original white collar displacements. New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment."
Little of what Amodei told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropic's work, days after it released a major model update to its Claude chatbot, one of the top rivals to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Amodei told CNN Thursday this great societal change would be driven by how incredibly fast AI technology is getting better and better — and that the AI boom "is bigger and it's broader and it's moving faster than anything has before...!"
Common Hucksters (Score:3)
There will be zero unemployment; rosy AI future (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Also, energy theory of value says that if AI did take more energy than a human worker, it would be more expensive to employ than a human. So, there's really not a world where AI is using all the energy because the only reason to use it in the first place is because it uses less energy.
News media needs a horse race or controversery (Score:2)
It's an obvious 'bait' news article trying to make the current 'AI will take jobs' one sided news coverage into a two-sided one.
Then repeatedly have 'experts' on both sides filling lots of news air time and newsprint article space with yes it will, no it won't headlines.
Refer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Here are some whingers on being replaced by AI (Score:2, Interesting)
Anecdotal, of course, but not insignificant
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
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Informative story. Mod parent up.
I just submitted your link as a Slashdot story: https://slashdot.org/firehose.... [slashdot.org]
What I put together circa 2010 is becoming more and more relevant:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of th
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it'll work maybe it won't but at least some of it is going to work.
And you know what it doesn't have to work 100%. If it works 20%, then your boss can fire 20%
And remember most of us here are older and better paid. We are going to be the first on the chopping block
but survival bias is a hell of a drug.
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And remember most of us here are older and better paid. We are going to be the first on the chopping block
I would expect that the oldest and best paid are also the most experienced, and presumably the hardest to replace with AI. The first to go likely will be entry-level employees.
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I would expect that the oldest and best paid are also the most experienced, and presumably the hardest to replace with AI.
Enshittification: They don't care if the AI's work is inferior to a human's, up to a point. As long as the AI is cheaper and the loss of customers, viewers, listeners etc. is less than the money saved in wages.
Blind leading the Stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
The blind irony of talking heads still broadcasting in Boomervision assuming that AI can't replace a talking head, is even funnier when CNN does it.
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Max Headroom was clearly ahead of his times.
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Max Headroom was clearly ahead of his times.
Indeed. He's gonna go by Max Newsroom soon.
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This is the joke thread I was looking for. Not eagerly, but low-hanging, perhaps even obligatory.
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Max Headroom was clearly ahead of his times.
bah. mis-moderated. qft instead.
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I agree, yet still believe AI is over-hyped and wasting electricity.
Re: Blind leading the Stupid. (Score:1)
The particularly funny thing is, that most CNN content could itself be replaced by a somewhat simple shell script, and nobody would notice.
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The blind irony of talking heads still broadcasting in Boomervision assuming that AI can't replace a talking head, is even funnier when CNN does it.
There's nothing ironic here. The text was written from a senior business writer, not a talking head. Reading a teleprompter or repeating a talking point is trivial to replace. But actually coming up with an opinion through creative thought (like the article in this case) is not something AI will be able to do in any foreseeable future.
Not everything about CNN is reduced to talking heads. You don't need to switch off your brain every time you see those three letters. If you do, you may actually be rife for r
Telling you about risks isn't a marketing pitch (Score:1, Interesting)
A lot of people act weird when AI companies cite risks of AI like "it might kill us all" or "it might take all our jobs", treating this like it's somehow a way of hyping up or fundraising for AI?
You know the cigarette companies did their best to deny the link to lung cancer, right? It's not in companies' interest to say their product could have bad effects. The reason AI company people say these things is because they believe them. Many of them have a background in thinking about AI safety and AI alignme
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To me it still comes across as a bit of backhanded marketing, just a matter of who they are marketing towards and the way they are framing it which is to shareholders and potential corporate customers.
The risk is that AI will be so successful we won't know what to do with so much productivity.
The risk is that your competitors will be reducing your payroll by 50%! and you'll still be paying for those humans.
The risk is these stocks will go up so fast, you don't want to risk missing out on all that money.
And
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If these companies really believe that what they are building is going to be massively detrimental to society (even if it may also have some benefits), then they would not be developing it at breakneck speed - they'd be lobbying government to regulate against it, especially since OpenAI and Anthropic were both founded to supposedly help mitigate the risks of AI. Of course OpenAI/Altman sold out long ago, but aren't Anthropic are still claiming to be a "public benefit" company?
This spiel of "Better watch out
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Unless you fix the price of rent, UBI won't work. Good luck ever getting US politicians to both fix the rents and give us UBI. Even Democrats won't go for it.
Re: Telling you about risks isn't a marketing pitc (Score:2)
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Why wouldn't UBI be a fixed number per person? It's a universal basic income, not a replacement for a good job. Maybe I lack vision, but I can't see how UBI for all is going to have us any better off then those currently on welfare. Being on welfare sucks and I'd rather just work a lame job then be on welfare.
It may not work that way in all countries, but the USA will sooner break back slavery then any kind of socialist system.
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Not being political here, but it's been decades since I've seen news rather than opinions backed by the opinions of selectively chosen experts.
CNN was a covid disaster. They kept presenting medical doctors, often general practitioners as scientists. It was like watching auto mechanics giving "educated advice" on structural engineering for bridges because cars and bridges are connected.
Re: We're Screwed (Score:2)
Re: CNN is Anti-White, WOKE Feminist Liars. ACTIVI (Score:2)
Productivity games are enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Americans hate nuance. We hate gradation. And we hate iteration. If something isn't black and white or doesn't work 100% out the gate we completely ignore it.
Here's the bottom line, the AI boom is going to result in massive amounts of automation. It's also going to result in Mass layoffs. Your boss will fire you and the guys who are left employed are either going to get a working ai, some form of automation, or they're going to have to work double shifts to make up for the broken automation and AI.
But your productivity is going to skyrocket, or you're going to get fired because your coworkers productivity skyrockets.
And just because there is nuance in how your boss fired you or forced you to work harder or replace you or whatever doesn't mean the economy isn't going to go into free fall and stay there permanently.
But fuck nuance amiright? Everything should be exactly the way it was when I was 12 and never change and if you say otherwise you're a bad person.
What Greed is too Blind to see. (Score:3)
Greed being blinded by greed, fails to realize the obvious with adopting AI in a "boom" fashion.
The first ones laid off, aren't even benefiting from UBI yet. They'll go directly to welfare (There is no more "unemployment" pay for the unemployable).
The second ones laid off, might benefit from the first iterations of UBI. This might be known as the "golden era" of UBI (think COVID checks) before Greed N. Corruption, AI Overlord buys a dozen more politicians and gets that whole UBI tax burden negotiated down
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70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 got taken by automation. But it's not like we don't have manufacturing jobs anymore we just have a hell of a lot less of them.
That’s an extraordinary assertion, and one you likely made up on the spot. As Bertrand Russell famously said, “The burden of proof lies upon the person who makes the claim.” I’m unaware of any credible data supporting this sweeping figure. Manufacturing jobs have indeed declined significantly—around 30-35% [epi.org]—but the middle class as a whole has been shaped by a complex mix of globalization, policy changes, and technological advances, not automation alone. A 2017 Brookings In [brookings.edu]
I've heard this before (Score:2)
Remember the internet circa 1990?
Lots of people said it was a fad, that it's just a curiosity that will eventually fade into obscurity.
Well...they were all wrong.
AI isn't just a new communications medium, it's a new way of thinking. It's a paradigm shift.
The difference is the 'killer' app for AI is something that out-thinks even the smartest human.
We're not ready for this.
Human jobs increase (Score:1)
LInus Torvalds (Score:2)
I'm with LInus on this one. . He says let's wait 10 years and see where this thing goes before we start making claims about people losing their jobs.
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Both sides (Score:2)
AI will not eliminate that many jobs. But it will change that many jobs. People won't be unemployed, but their work will look different. Who tells humans aren't needed wants to sell you something.
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Outsourcing is quickly during too. We used to use AI (actual Indians) by the score. One $10 a month subscription replaced them all.
One "startup" I'm assisting will use robot
AI: Fastest Social Paradigm Shift in History (Score:1)
The recent interviews with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—reported by Axios and CNN—offer a sobering forecast: AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within just a few years, potentially pushing unemployment rates to levels not seen since the worst of the Covid pandemic.
I don’t think this is just another tech hype cycle. Unlike previous waves that automated manual labor or routine tasks, we’re now facing cognitive automation capable of replicating—and often su
So what tariffs? (Score:2)
(I'm not sure myself if I'm joking or serious here).