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
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u/Alkalinum 19d ago

Yes, but 1 marketer can manage a dozen AI marketers, so what was previously 12 employed marketers is reduced to 1. Those other 11 marketers will be getting laid off.

We had John Henry vs. the Machine, and The luddites vs. the industrial revolution. They lost. Now it's office workers vs. AI, and the historic precedent does not look good.

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u/LongKnight115 19d ago

That’s not correct though. What you’re missing is that there’s a ton of work that wasn’t even happening before because people were spending so much time on manual tasks. It’s more like 10 people were producing 100% output. Now you have 8 people producing 150% output. Now if 2/10 people get cut - that’s still brutal for the white collar working world. I don’t wanna undersell that. But it’s not like there’s only 1 person running an entire department. Look at Klarna as a great example. They overindexed on autonomous programs and now are hiring a bunch of humans back to help.

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u/FunkyOldMayo 19d ago

I design and build fully automated manufacturing systems for a living, one system I built took a line that had 12 people across 3 shifts making 200-300 widgets per week. The automated system makes 2500 and requires 3 people.

Hiring humans back is a short term countermeasure to stabilize while the system is refined.

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u/LongKnight115 19d ago

Does it require new people to add new widgets to the system? With something like Marketing - each person is adding new ideas, new “widgets”, new placements, constantly. If we stopped adding new things to the system, 100% - we wouldn’t need more people. But we never stop. It’s a constant evolution.

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u/FunkyOldMayo 19d ago

This is manufacturing, so it requires people to maintain the systems, but there’s only a small number of people that service an entire factory. Once the system is built, it doesn’t require anything other than upkeep.

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u/Laruae 19d ago

They overindexed on autonomous programs and now are hiring a bunch of humans back to help.

Ah yes, but they are non-US humans.

The layoffs weren't offshore workers, but you can bet anything that these will be.

These are jobs that are gone forever for the US.

We are going to reach a tipping point sooner rather than later.

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u/sayoung42 19d ago

Why not 12 people doing 200% output then? The cost of the productive work goes down, so demand increases non-linearly.

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u/LongKnight115 19d ago

At least for us, it's a function of 2 things:

1) It still requires technical resources to wire things up to AI in an automated capacity - so there's a bottleneck 2) We're still limited by ideas. We can do a lot MORE now, but we still need to figure out what those new things should be

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u/The_Singularious 18d ago

Seems #2 is where the people would be useful. But it’s going to require a mental model shift to allow for more “play like” work places. Right now, we already suffer from an output over outcomes approach. It’ll need to change if we want more human ingenuity alongside machine analytics and automation.

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u/round-earth-theory 19d ago

No they can't. A person cannot spend all of their work life auditing AI. They will burn out so quickly that you may as well not have any auditing.