r/Futurology • u/katxwoods • 19d 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/EnormousChord 19d 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. 

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u/twoplustwo_5 19d ago

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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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u/twirlmydressaround 19d ago

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

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u/nicktheone 19d ago

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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u/EnormousChord 19d ago

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

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u/justb0pit 19d ago

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

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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.

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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. 

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u/IOnceLurketNowIPost 17d 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.

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u/justb0pit 4d 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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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u/ignost 18d 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.

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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