White Collars No Longer Have a Collar to Wear: AI to Push Unemployment to 20%, Warns Anthropic CEO

AI has the potential to kill 20% of jobs of U.S. professionals in the next five years, says Amodei

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Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, says that Artificial Intelligence will lead to job losses in the upcoming five years. This is a serious warning from the top tech leaders related to job loss in America. 

According to Amodei, 20% of U.S. professionals will lose jobs, especially professionals working in offices. This means 1 in every 5 people will be without a job. 

Currently, the employment rate in the U.S. is 4.2%, which is relatively low. With the continuous growth in AI, many office jobs would disappear. 

Jobs that will be in danger are related to writing, accounting, and software engineering. These jobs will be jeopardized as AI has become smart enough to execute tasks just like humans do. 

Due to such uncertainty, Amodie wants companies and the government to present a clear slate in front of people, rather than keeping them in the shadow that AI is not a threat and won’t change anything. According to him, people shall be prepared for what’s coming next. 

Other tech leaders also agree. Satya Nadella said the AI is the actual coder now for the biggest part of his company’s code, about 30%. 

Sundar Pichai equally testified to this state of affairs sizable part of their code is also being written by AI. So, human labor is what largely stands in the way of AI. 

There are also changes for banks. A new report states that about 200,000 jobs could be cut in banks worldwide in the next few years because of AI. Most of these jobs include areas of support such as operations and data entry.

While this sounds scary indeed, there are some optimists out there. The hope, rather, is to reskill people to work alongside AI, instead of being replaced by it. 

According to the World Economic Forum, 77% of employers are keen to offer re-training to their workers to better co-exist with AI.

In short, AI changes the nature of working processes. Many careers will cease to exist; yet, if we start preparing now, keep on learning, and plan for an alternative final destination, new work opportunities will await us. Leaders must be very clear about what lies ahead, and workers must prepare themselves for an adaptation period so that this daunting challenge can become an opportunity for growth.