CEO warns AI could wipe out 1 in 2 white collar jobs in next five years

The head of one of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence labs has warned the technology could eliminate half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years. Fresh off promoting his company’s technology at a developer conference, Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that politicians and businesses are not prepared for the spike in unemployment rates AI could prompt. “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,” the 42-year-old said in an interview with Cooper.“AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.” The technology that companies like his are building, Amodei said, could boost unemployment in America as high as 20 per cent by 2030. Anthropic’s AI can work nearly seven hours a day, he said, and has the skills typically required of entry-level corporate workers – “the ability to summarise a document, analyse a bunch of sources and put it into a report, write computer code” – at the same standard “as a smart college student”. “We can see where the trend is going, and that’s what’s driving some of the concern [about AI in the workforce],” Amodei said. Though Amodei acknowledged it would “definitely not [be] in my economic interest” to do so, he urged US politicians to consider implementing a tax on AI labs. He said he was “raising the alarm” because his counterparts at other companies “haven’t as much and I think someone needs to say it and to be clear”. “It’s eerie the extent to which the broader public and politicians, legislators, I don’t think, are fully aware of what’s going on,” he said. In a separate interview with US publication Axios, Amodei said such workforce changes are “going to happen in a small amount of time – as little as a couple of years or less”. “Cancer ...