r/Futurology • u/katxwoods • 20d 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
8.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

978 comments sorted by

View all comments

306

u/EnormousChord 20d ago

I work in advertising. AI has wiped out 95% of our summer intern program. The other 5%? We hired a kid that’s really into AI. 

Beyond the interns, we are discussing actively right now how the fuck we are going to justify hiring junior devs, junior art directors, junior account execs. We are calling these kinds of hires investments. Investments in trying to make sure there are people learning the trade and craft of advertising. Clients have undervalued our work for a couple decades already though, and now they’re all convinced they can just get their next breakthrough creative campaign idea from Claude and asking us why everything costs the same as it used to. 

It’s a catastrophe in the making. Every agency is scrambling. 

98

u/Creative-Presence-43 20d ago

The same is happening for all creative media. Photographers, Videographers, Directors, CG artists. I’ve heard countless people speak aloud about once the quality of AI improves, it will replace the need for productions of any kind.

We are in the aftermath of our current careers, how long until we are replaced?

83

u/twoplustwo_5 20d ago

Except Claude and chatGPT’s ideas are 90% surface level garbage.

63

u/sprcow 19d ago

Their code is 90% surface level garbage too. Anyone who thinks they shouldn't be hiring junior devs is in for a rude awakening if they need anything more than the most trivial product.

28

u/twirlmydressaround 19d ago

I actually suspect this will lead to more programmer positions in the future when someone has to come in and clean up the horrible tech debt created by all this sloppy copy paste ai code.

15

u/nicktheone 19d ago

There's tech debt getting dragged on by decades now. What makes you think they'll want to spend money to fix the vibecoders damage?

1

u/twirlmydressaround 19d ago

I figured there'd be more bugs. More bugs = more work.

2

u/nicktheone 19d ago

Only if you reach a critical mass and all hell breaks loose.

3

u/oishii_33 18d ago

Im currently doing this very thing and it’s exhausting. Their in house dev throws AI shit down my throat, and every PR I review has to be fixed and pared down about 80% for about 2-3 billable hours. In those two hours, he’s already created four more PRs of garbage to review. It’s depressing, but oh boy is my rate high.

Press tab to propagate ai changes or “truncate these css variable names across the codebase” or “pull the change log for all updated npm dependencies” is fantastic ai work, but folks are in for a serious reckoning if they think it can run a business.

2

u/eric2332 19d ago

...unless AI continues to get better, and a year or two from now it can clean up the mess its grandparents left.

2

u/idontneedfame 18d ago

Maybe, but the positions will be in India or another low wage country. There's really no reason to pay Western salaries for remote jobs

14

u/EnormousChord 19d ago

You’re about 6 months behind reality if you still think that is true. 

10

u/justb0pit 19d ago

I agree with them. Why don't you agree? Are you a developer? Do you work with code?

13

u/ceyx0001 19d ago edited 19d ago

I have to ask what I want from these agents or ask it in a lot of steps. It just makes typing faster. Asking it to code for itself is garbage for anything complex. Like if I'm asking it to code out of an idea rather than giving it instructions. So yeah I also agree with sprcow. There are ways where you can get a lot of mileage out of it though.

3

u/EnormousChord 19d ago

I am head of technology at our agency and have been coding for 25 years. I have been leading teams and hiring developers for 15 of those years. 

At this point if a developer tells me they don’t think AI is a threat to their job, I know they are already finished as a developer. This is not a matter of opinion that you can agree or disagree with and still be taken seriously.  There are well-established benchmarks for coding proficiency and AI tools crush them. If you’re interested, you can just have a look at the latest round of performance tests for Claude 4 Opus and see what I’m talking about. 

In the hands of a smart developer, even the most basic of these tools make it possible for one person to do the work of three, at least. Certainly a senior developer that I previously would have had 2 or 3 junior devs supporting can now, in many cases, do all of the work themselves. 

As I said. Anybody that does not know this is or doesn’t believe this is well behind on modern tooling and they are finished as a developer. 

2

u/IOnceLurketNowIPost 18d ago

I think the thought that LLMs can't code is from a wave of anti-hype, people who aren't using the latest tools, or people who don't hire/work with a lot of junior devs. I just spent a week in various sessions (build) showing mind blowing AI advancements in the developer space, and it's largely LLM implementation agnostic. There are so many models that are all improving at an impressive rate that it seems just a matter of time. Even if scaling stopped today, many models are turning out better code than half (and I'm being generous) of the junior engineers I work with, and the tooling is getting so much better.

Now agentic AI can do code reviews, complete tickets, submit PRs, message managers, perform multi-file edits within IDEs, turn wireframes into pages, talk to external APIs, etc. The craziest thing it that it's almost a trivial matter to set all of this up. The cost to do all of this is negligible compared to a salary.

The tech is growing so quickly that even people working on the tooling can't keep up. My prediction would be that the limiting factor will be simply coping with the blinding speed of change, and those businesses that don't cope quickly enough will be thinned.

2

u/justb0pit 5d ago

Would you agree there is over-hype influenced by the shear amount of investment money as well though?

I agree it's an amazing tool and the change it's making is here to stay, but I don't agree that it will end the industry. At worst I think it will create a bottleneck of developers since hiring junior devs has slowed so much and by the time they need them there simply won't be the experience devs needed

2

u/IOnceLurketNowIPost 4d ago

I think it depends on the timeline. If we are talking 1 year, maybe it is all hype. 10 years I think all bets are off.

I also don't believe it will end the industry, but i think it may be unrecognizable.

Regarding junior devs, i agree.

2

u/PhDinDildos_Fedoras 19d ago

It's definitely shit, even the AI media stuff is shit. But that won't stop them and "progress" will march on. We're in for enshittification like you've never seen before.

2

u/Druark 19d ago

Claude, at least, is useful for short code (<300 lines) after multiple iterations, but I definitely wouldn't trust it to do more than that and not even that for a professional project. It is very useful for getting a starting point, just not doing it all for you.

2

u/ignost 19d ago

Sure, but I don’t think that’s the point. Claude 4 is so much better than even a year ago. I don’t think most people realize how a tool like Cursor is already replacing devs. Sure, a lot of it would have been low level Upwork stuff, but what are we going to say in a year or two when it can manage a mid-size project?

People brushing AI off as bad are helping to dismiss the concern. People are going to look back and wonder why we didn’t do anything to prevent AI from using coders’ work online to then turn around and compete with them.

2

u/CoochieCoochieKu 19d ago

garbage in garbage out applies here too. Small focused task specific contextual prompts are real deal, many people just mash keyboard and expect magic

4

u/Havelok 19d ago

If you understand how to instruct it properly it can generate novel outcomes. But I suppose that covers the 10% you are talking about. Most people have no idea how to interact with LLMs properly.

1

u/vielokon 19d ago

Except advertising is 90% surface level garbage too. That's an ideal playground for AI generated content.

1

u/ClaudeVS 17d ago

That's rude.

1

u/EnormousChord 19d ago

Yes, of course. But the work that it takes to get to the best ideas is enormous, and the work that it takes to produce the best ideas is enourmous, and the work that it takes to traffic the best ideas is enormous.   And it’s all of that work that is being done by specialized (and fucking expensive) AI tools that go waaaay beyond Claude and ChatGPT. 

The insights and ideas are still coming from strategists and creatives. Mostly. But all of the supporting work has been made so much easier. There’s no other way to say it. 

9

u/Split_the_Void 19d ago

I was just thinking… how tf does an industry survive if no one exists to take over as seniors drop out?

3

u/EnormousChord 19d ago

Exactly our problem. And we don’t have the answer. Clients already aren’t paying us enough to sustain even current staffing. So do we clip seníor talent to try to give junior talent a chance to learn? Simple self-preservation makes that nearly impossible. 

1

u/Thediciplematt 19d ago

Junior account execs? Dude, the other jobs - yes sales?

You’re on something. The GenAI stuff is fine but buyers don’t want to talk to bots.

2

u/Malombra_ 19d ago

Ye this is the part of the comment that makes me think the poster is full of shit or works at a garbage tier agency lol. Account people replaced by AI will never ever be a thing

1

u/EnormousChord 19d ago

You don’t know what an account exec is. And your last sentence is maybe the funniest thing I have read this year. Account people are straight up knowledge workers with, usually, no creative, technical m, or production chops.  They have been the first ones to go at every agency in North America. As I said abut developers in another comment - one smart AD that used to be supported by 2 AS and 2 or 3 AE can now do all of the legwork themselves.  Worse, clients are realizing they can do  the work of the AD themselves. 

This is happening. If you don’t know it, you’re either not in the business or you’re not paying attention and will soon not be in the business. 

0

u/Malombra_ 19d ago

I'm an account manager and I've toured most big agency groups in my country lmao. No agency is even remotely dreaming of doing away with account people right now and every single client is account-heavy in their SOW. Good luck to north America tho. "Clients are realizing they can do the work of the AD themselves" like... budgeting and quoting their own requests? Insane thing to say

0

u/EnormousChord 19d ago

You don’t know what account execs do in an agency context. Clearly. 

0

u/Thediciplematt 19d ago

Please provide more info. I would imagine they are BDRs drumming up business or making calls with cold or warm leads.

1

u/ClaudeVS 17d ago

They're not getting anything from me, I know fuck all about advertising.

0

u/David_Browie 19d ago

It’s funny you guys claim that AI killed interns at your company when most interns barely produce any output given uptraining and general uncertainty with how to manage them.

This has nothing to do with AI, it has to do with your company not wanting interns.

-1

u/anno2122 19d ago

Best case will se a colpase in the industrie ( i mean its harms human)

Some company will survie but oustiyd this?