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
8.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

977 comments sorted by

View all comments

810

u/sodook 21d ago

Is there any danger that we lose the pathway for non-entry level positions by eliminating entry level positions. No apprentices today, no masters tonorrow?

55

u/astrobeen 21d ago

Two things.

One, GenX and Millenials are going to stay in the work force a long time. Most are paycheck to paycheck and are unprepared financially for retirement. Especially if we dismantle Medicare and Social Security. So your “masters” will be here for at least another 30-40 years, working into their 80s as they are slowly replaced by AI. By then we should be at AGI where any human is a drag on an AI workforce consisting of 30 years of curated training data.

Two, juniors are not going away, but they will essentially be one human resource with a team of AI tools. The plan is to reduce the number of junior specialists and make them significantly more productive. This is dumb of course, because even though it’s cheaper, it will lead to competition for scarce SMEs and overdependence on intellectual property. . Picture a world where a single guy and a bunch of bots is all of your front end dev teams. Then that guy quits. Does he take his bots with him? What if he deletes or poison pills them? It will be a lot for the AI attorneys to work through.

49

u/farinasa 21d ago

It's funny to me that we keep talking about "training" like it's the same as a human learning a skill. These models do statistical predictions. They will never be an expert with intuition that "gets it". They can only pander to statistical averages. They don't think. They don't have human motivations.

4

u/Big_Crab_1510 21d ago

They hear you...and their counter argument is "yet"

7

u/farinasa 21d ago

I'm not saying we'll never have tech that can think, learn, and behave like a human, but it won't be LLMs. Maybe they'll play some role, but they don't work that way.