Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei amplified those concerns in May when he warned AI could spike unemployment, particularly among white-collar jobs, to 20% over the next one to five years. Certain companies are already enlisting AI to do some of the work previously done by people; Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce are increasingly using AI to code among other tasks. And CEOs of companies ranging from Amazon to JPMorgan have warned their human workforces will shrink because of AI.
However, some of those predictions deserve a healthy dose of skepticism. “AI is so good, it’s going to put humans out of jobs” is a strong marketing message for companies selling the technology, and a potentially convenient excuse for an executive already mulling a workforce downsize.
The answer to whether AI really spells trouble for human workers isn’t so black and white. That’s according to more than half a dozen tech industry insiders CNN spoke with over the past month, who are mixed on just how much and how fast AI will upend the job market.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, for example, told CNN AI will kill jobs only if “the world runs out of ideas.” And Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told CNN that an AI “jobpocalypse” is among his minor concerns when it comes to the technology’s impact.
Nonetheless, tech companies themselves have cut hundreds, in some cases thousands, of roles this year as they implement AI to take on a growing share of software development and other tasks.
There does seem to be broad consensus that the nature of work, including how it’s done and which tasks humans do, is going to change, and perhaps more rapidly than with any previous technological transformation the world has seen before.
More than half of Americans say…
