Trump AI czar hits back at ‘doomer cult’ and mass-unemployment fears

White House AI czar David Sacks dismissed concerns about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the job market on Tuesday following a dire warning from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that unemployment could climb as high as 20 percent in the next one to five years.

White House AI czar David Sacks dismissed concerns about artificial intelligence taking away jobs on Tuesday, just days after a major AI leader warned the technology could lead unemployment to climb as high as 20% in the next few years. “Personally, I don’t think it’s (AI) going to lead to a giant wave of unemployment,” Sacks told attendees at the Amazon Web Services summit in Washington, DC. “I think it’s actually very hard to replace a human job entirely. I think it’s easier to replace pieces of it.” “I don’t think we’re going to have 20% unemployment,” he added. The comments come after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios that artificial intelligence could wipe out as much as half of entry-level, white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper last month, Amodei said he feared people won’t adapt quickly enough to the speed of AI’s innovations. “I really worry, particularly at the entry level, that the AI models are very much at the center of what an entry level human-worker would do,” he cautioned. “I think we do need to be raising the alarm. I think we do need to be concerned about it. I think policymakers do need to worry about it.”