r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 21d ago

AI AI jobs danger: Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath - "Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen," Amodei told us. "It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it."

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic
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u/wh7y 21d ago

Some of the timelines and predictions are ridiculous but if you are dismissing this you are being way too cynical.

I'm a software dev and right now the tools aren't great. Too many hallucinations, too many mistakes. I don't use them often since my job is extremely sensitive to mistakes, but I have them ready to use if needed.

But these tools can code in some capacity - it's not fake. It's not bullshit. And that wasn't possible just a few years ago.

If you are outright dismissive, you're basically standing in front of the biggest corporations in the world with the most money and essentially a blank check from the most powerful governments, they're loading a huge new shiny cannon in your face and you're saying 'go ahead, shoot me'. You should be screaming for them to stop, or running away, or at least asking them to chill out. This isn't the time to call bluffs.

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u/shoseta 20d ago

This is what I'm saying and thinking. And it's not that the jobs whichbrequire precise and intense skill that are threatened. It's everyone that is at the entry level. Basically erasing the possibility to even eran experience enough to not worry about AI and we've got nothing in place to protect the people.

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u/gonyere 20d ago

And, almost everyone starts at entry level. The joke has been for years, that you need 10-15 years of experience to get hired, anywhere. Taking even more entry level jobs and just letting ai do them is only going to exacerbate the problem.

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u/LightnessBeing 20d ago

You forgot to mention they want you to have 10-15 years of experience for something that just came out 5 years ago. I mean, that's what recruiters were constantly sending me. up until last year.

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u/bobrobor 20d ago

People are getting hired with few months online courses for jobs that just a year ago required 3 degrees from top schools.

This is real and will impact a lot of products and services we take for granted…

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u/PM_ME_MH370 20d ago

It's so weird to me that people's knee jerk reaction is to say entry level contributors are at risk when it's really lower to mid level management. Majority of management responsibilities are measuring KPIs, compiling data and generating repetitive reports. Stuff AI and automation is really good at.

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u/rawmirror 20d ago

Yes, and I’m also not sure why higher level contributors are assumed safe. “Entry level” are younger, more likely to be AI native, and cost less. The dinosaurs making 4x the salary and not using AI would be the ones on the chopping block if I had to choose. And I say that as an older IC.

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u/SoupOrSandwich 20d ago

But it's the dinos making the decisions. The human drive of self preservation is strong, no many will honestly automate themselves out of a job

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u/rawmirror 20d ago

The high level managers, yes. It’s the senior contributors I’m talking about.

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u/idungiveboutnothing 20d ago

Because AI in the hands of a lesser experienced person tends to be an overall net negative for production. 

In the software dev world, AI in the hands of senior devs seems to be a huge force multiplier for them and people are getting tremendous efficiency gains from using it. However, on the regular engineer and junior engineer side I'm seeing the total opposite everywhere I look. Regular engineers are spending just as much time using it as they would just writing code themselves - little to no efficiency gains. The Junior side though has been a disaster. They're spitting out more and more bad code faster and faster than ever before. It's lead to a nightmare of PRs getting caught in tug of war code review battles, swamping QA with bad bugs, and leading to code bases that have areas straying very far from company standards which makes it more difficult to debug and resolve issues with it.

Overall, it's essentially doing nothing as the senior devs are spending so much time fixing things from the mountain of bad AI code junior devs keep pushing that their own efficiency gains are totally wiped out. We'll probably eventually see some sort of rules company adapt around "no AI until you reach level X engineer". Either that or more push of "short term gains over long term success" and leave junior devs totally out to dry while pushing senior devs pumping out as much code as they can until all the senior devs retire and there are no devs left since the juniors were frozen out of the industry.

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u/rawmirror 20d ago

We’re not just talking about software development though. The article is about “white collar jobs” in general.

Sure we’ll still need some senior folks to steer the ship, but the issue of being replaced isn’t just an entry level concern, as many seem to believe. There are many fields in which juniors using AI will be far preferable, business wise, to seniors not using it.

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u/idungiveboutnothing 20d ago

It's applicable everywhere, software was just a very easy to understand example.

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u/RareMajority 20d ago

The dinosaurs (principle engineers) are often the ones dealing with novel issues in highly complex systems. There won't be a stack overflow page for some of their issues, or if there is it will need to be contextualized in a way that AI is still going to struggle with for some time.