Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei issued a startling warning this week in an interview with Axios, predicting that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and paint a future scenario where "20% of people are out of work."
Prediction of the Four-Stage Labor Crisis
This billionaire technology entrepreneur detailed his expected progression of the labor crisis: Stage One: Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic continue to develop large language models, making them "perform at or even surpass human performance in more and more tasks." Stage Two: Governments neither "regulate artificial intelligence" nor warn the public about potential risks due to concerns about Chinese competition and labor unrest. Stage Three: Ordinary workers "do not realize the growing power of artificial intelligence and its threat to their own employment," being unprepared for impending changes. Stage Four: Enterprises "suddenly shift almost overnight," replacing human employees with AI on a massive scale. "By the time the public realizes this, it will be too late."
Contradictory Doomsday Vision
Amodei painted an extreme contradictory vision of the future: "Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% annually, and budgets are balanced—but 20% of people are unemployed." He claimed, "As creators of this technology, we have the responsibility and obligation to honestly address what is about to happen."
Criticism Questions Motives
However, the leader of this $30 billion to $400 billion AI company faces a sharp criticism: if he truly believes his warning, why doesn't he completely abandon Anthropic and instead invest his time and resources into combating what he considers to be an economic threat?
The Gap Between Technological Reality and Hype
In-depth analysis shows that Amodei's vision may be overly exaggerated: Increasingly apparent technical limitations: Despite claims by AI companies that they are developing "better" models, these newer models are becoming increasingly prone to hallucinations, flattery, and generalization errors. Law of diminishing returns: The current most advanced AI has little significant impact on work efficiency, and performance improvements may slow down. Academic disagreement: Most serious computer science researchers do not believe human-level AI is imminent.
Who Is Creating the Regulatory Vacuum?
Critics point out that it is tech giants like Amodei, not China or ordinary people, who are inciting regulatory agencies to be inactive. American lawmakers believe AI poses fatal dangers, so they rush to give self-regulatory powers to tech companies.
Actual Impact on Employment
Currently, the actual impact of AI on the labor market mainly comes from hype around it, rather than the inherent excellence of the technology itself. Many businesses lay off employees based on AI hype rather than because AI truly possesses the capability to replace humans.
It is worth noting that automation anxiety is most strongly felt among vulnerable groups in the labor market, who are likely to be the first victims of unemployment caused by AI.
If Amodei wants to uncover the root cause of the current chaos in the labor market caused by AI, critics suggest he "just needs to look in the mirror closest to him." The leader in the AI field who creates potentially job-eliminating technologies while calling on society to pay attention to their threats deserves careful consideration.