Why this leading AI CEO is warning the tech could cause mass unemployment

The chief executive of one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs is warning that the technology could cause a dramatic spike in unemployment in the very near future. He says policymakers and corporate leaders aren’t ready for it.

The chief executive of one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs is warning that the technology could cause a dramatic spike in unemployment in the very near future. He says policymakers and corporate leaders aren’t ready for it. “AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview on Thursday. “AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.” The full conversation is set to air on CNN at 8 p.m. ET. Amodei believes the AI tools that Anthropic and other companies are racing to build could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to as much as 20% in the next one to five years, he told Axios on Wednesday. That could mean the US unemployment rate growing fivefold in just a few years; the last time it neared that rate was briefly at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not the first dire warning about how rapidly advancing AI could upend the economy in the coming years. Academics and economists have also cautioned that AI could replace some jobs or tasks in the coming years, with varying degrees of seriousness. Earlier this year, a World Economic Forum survey showed that 41% of employers plan to downsize their workforce because of AI automation by 2030. But Amodei’s prediction is notable because it’s coming from one of the industry’s top leaders and because of the scale of disruption it foretells. It also comes as Anthropic is now selling AI technology on the promise that it can work nearly the length of a typical human workday.