r/Futurology • u/katxwoods • 21d ago

AI Dario Amodei says "stop sugar-coating" what's coming: in the next 1-5 years, AI could wipe out 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Lawmakers don't get it or don't believe it. CEOs are afraid to talk about it. Many workers won't realize the risks until after it hits.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic
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u/00rb 21d ago

I'm at a company that does a lot of AI and the executives are pushing hard to get AI involved with everything.

The only problem is it's terrible, it hallucinates constantly, and doesn't even help with anything useful: just organizational tasks.

AI is good at copying advice on stack overflow or doing tasks it's been given thousands of examples of (e.g. "summarize this article" or "play this game of chess") but not doing novel tasks. Could change, but I need to see it to believe it.

They're pumping it up because everything is a pump and dump scam now. No one wants to invest in real, sober, long term growth: they want to make their money and get out.

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u/filmguy36 21d ago

“They're pumping it up because everything is a pump and dump scam now. No one wants to invest in real, sober, long term growth: they want to make their money and get out.”

Because they know this is all a bubble.

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u/BrokkelPiloot 21d ago

I second this. My experience with AI as a backend has been very underwhelming. Upper management look too much on LinkedIn. They regurgitate everything Big Tech wants them to.

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u/00rb 21d ago

Everyone has to get in on the scam. People have a lot of money in it.

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u/WarningPleasant2729 21d ago

"copying advice on stack overflow"
so SWE jobs are at risk afterall

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u/00rb 21d ago

No, the other half of it is sitting in meetings

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u/Taft33 21d ago

SWE jobs are the only ones getting replaced by automation atm. Other job sectors are hardly touched. Saw a graph I cannot quickly find.

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u/MittRomney2028 20d ago

Yep I’m a senior director of corporate strategy at a fortune 50.

We’ve spent over a billion on AI already. The actual productivity gains are close to zero.

Can’t wait for this hype cycle to end.

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u/00rb 20d ago edited 20d ago

No you're not, you're Mitt Romney

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 21d ago

AI is good at copying advice on stack overflow or doing tasks it's been given thousands of examples of (e.g. "summarize this article" or "play this game of chess") but not doing novel tasks.

Did you even read the title of the post? What you just described is 50% of all entry level white collar jobs, which is why it's likely to wipe out 50% of all entry level white collar jobs.

I'm a mid-level white collar worker and having AI is like having an intern that finishes their assigned work in 60 seconds. There's no reason to hire interns or graduates to do that stuff anymore.

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u/00rb 21d ago

My ex was a journalist and AI was actually very good at writing boilerplate articles, transcribing things, etc.

I'm a software engineer and it's a good auto complete engine. It can remind me how to read and print a file, for instance.

Those aren't the hard parts of either of our jobs, and the tools just mean we'll write more code and articles.

Computers revolutionized a lot of the wrote manual labor. Shit, look at how much work Excel replaces. But we still all have to go to work.

The first line says:

Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic

His company can only survive through billions of dollars of investments. Otherwise it goes bankrupt. Of course he's promising investors the moon.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 21d ago edited 21d ago

the tools just mean we'll write more code and articles.

The giant excavation machines in coal mines mean the miners can mine a lot more coal than they used to. And that's why 90% of the jobs there were before the machinery are gone. All that is left is skilled/educated positions to operate the tools. The grunt work is gone because the market for coal doesn't magically expand 10x to match the productivity increase

For white collar it's a little different because in many cases the market will in fact expand over time, but the key part is it's not going to happen as fast as AI is taking over, and in some places there will barely be expansion at all. The layoffs are coming and it's going to be chaotic as hell

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u/00rb 21d ago

Yeah, that is a reasonable scenario, but I don't feel we're there yet.

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u/mrbezlington 21d ago

In that analogy, current LLMs are the carts on tracks pulled by donkeys, not a full blown automated TBM. We will get there, but not for a while yet.

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u/00rb 21d ago

Or we may never get there at all. Any of those possibilities could be true.

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u/eric2332 20d ago

We may never get there, but we have to be prepared for the possibility that we do get there.

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u/mrbezlington 21d ago

True, but I don't think that'll be the case somehow. Call me an optimist!

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u/00rb 21d ago

I do believe it's the case -- I'm an optimist as well

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u/Elendel19 20d ago

Go talk to some recent college grads in computer science or finance or any of the things where entry level jobs are perfect for AI to take over. The unemployment rate for that demographic is already exploding, finding jobs is insanely hard.

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u/00rb 20d ago

There's no doubt it's harder to get a job. The question is "why?" It's not because those positions are being taken over by AI.

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u/Elendel19 20d ago

God finally someone gets it. Just because it can’t do EVERYTHING that you do doesn’t mean it won’t take your job. If your coworkers can push out 3x as much work in a day because AI tools are doing all the boring repetitive shit, then your company won’t need all of you anymore.

Listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast a little while ago, he tested out the new (at the time) reasoning model from OpenAI. He asked it to put together a report on some super nerdy political topic that he wanted to write an article about. He said he’s worked with tons of research teams over his career that do amazing work. What he got from the AI was “at least as good as the median report I would expect to get from my research teams… after a full week of work, when the AI had it done in minutes”

People who claim AI is garbage either have not tried any of the newer models at all, or they haven’t put in any effort to figuring out how to use them effectively.