Artificial intelligence may not deliver on its promise of vast economic opportunity at a price that humanity is willing to pay
In March, Anthropic, the cutting-edge artificial intelligence business that gave us the chatbot Claude, published an analysis on the impact of AI on employment, to help us assess the claim that intelligent robots were about to redefine human existence, ending demand for human labor.
Last year in May, Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, claimed AI could wipe out half of all entry-level jobs in one to five years. Last January, he told us AI would probably become a “general labor substitute for humans”. In June he said we risk “a world where the economic trade-off dial is stuck on the hypergrowth, hyper-inequality setting”.
And yet, Anthropic’s report suggests that, so far, AI’s impact has fallen short of expectations: “We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022,” the report stated. Deployment of the technology “remains a fraction of what’s feasible”. Claude covers just 33% of all tasks in the computer and math category whereas theoretically it could take over nearly 100% of them.
Spending on datacenters is going through the roof, for sure, but productivityhas not been experiencing the galloping gains that the technorati’s epochal prognostications lead one to expect. Labor productivity was, in fact, slower in the first three years of our AI era than during the information technology boom that began in the mid 1990s.
Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman, AI’s most public face, says he now doubts its job-killing potential. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,” he said in May. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor noted: “A lot of people have noticed that the world is not changing as fast as they predicted.”
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