The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype machine

Summary

A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. New York CNN — If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it’s going to ruin the global economy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality. Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up. ICYMI: The 42-year-old billionaire Dario Amodei, who runs the AI firm Anthropic, told Axios this week that the technology he and other companies are building could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs … sometime soon. Maybe in the next couple of years, he said. He reiterated that claim in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday. “AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Amodei told Cooper. “AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.” To be clear, 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. (As an aside: I asked labor economist Aaron Sojourner about this scenario of high unemployment plus strong economic growth, and he said there is a theory of the case, if you squint really hard. Amodei may believe that AI can increase productivity and make each hour of labor create m...