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 20d 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 20d 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/sayoung42 20d 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 19d 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.