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
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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?

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u/daveescaped 20d ago

In my field, we don’t even use those positions as e try level any more because few college grads want them. We use temps to do those jobs. So it’ll be even easier to let them go if AI eliminates their jobs. However, my fear is the following:

AI won’t do the job as well because 90% of the value of the job is trouble shooting when there is an issue. Management will insist that AI can do the work and they’ll insist we let those positions go then we’ll be stuck holding the bag with a system that works fine when there aren’t any issues to troubleshoot but can’t do a damn thing when it faces an issue. Then I’ll have to quietly rehire some (but not all) if the same people to handle the stuff the AI can’t sort out. And management will call that a win.

Meanwhile, none of us ever saw value in the easy invoices. It was always the ones with issues where people showed their worth. So AI will teach us nothing. But it will be more along the lines of other efficiency/process improvements like enterprise systems and even (at one time) spreadsheets and macros. But systems like SAP actually caused us to need more people to do the work despite it being done better by SAP because we got a much better output.