Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen
Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, warned in a New York Times article last month that AI is breaking “the bottom rungs of the career ladder — junior software developers … junior paralegals and first-year law-firm associates “who once cut their teeth on document review” … and young retail associates who are being supplanted by chatbots and other automated customer service tools.
Less public are the daily C-suite conversations everywhere about pausing new job listings or filling existing ones, until companies can determine whether AI will be better than humans at fulfilling the task.
The AI blow can be softened by creating greater awareness among public and charging a token tax
This will likely juice historic growth for the winners: the big AI companies, the creators of new businesses feeding or feeding off AI, existing companies running faster and vastly more profitably, and the wealthy investors betting on this outcome.
The result could be a great concentration of wealth, and “it could become difficult for a substantial part of the population to really contribute,” Amodei told us. “And that’s really bad. We don’t want that. The balance of power of democracy is premised on the average person having leverage through creating economic value. If that’s not present, I think things become kind of scary. Inequality becomes scary. And I’m worried about it.”
Amodei sees himself as a truth-teller, “not a doomsayer,” and he was eager to talk to us about solutions. None of them would change the reality we’ve sketched above — market forces are going to keep propelling AI toward human-like reasoning. Even if progress in the US were throttled, China would keep racing ahead.
Amodei is hardly hopeless. He sees a variety of ways to mitigate the worst scenarios, as do others. Here are a few ideas distilled from our conversations with Anthropic and others deeply involved in mapping and pre-empting the problem:
Speed up public awareness with government and AI companies more transparently explaining the workforce changes to come. Be clear that some jobs are so vulnerable that it’s worth reflecting on your career path now. “The first step is warn,” Amodei says. He created an Anthropic Economic Index, which provides real-world data on Claude usage across occupations, and the Anthropic Economic Advisory Council to help stoke public debate. Amodei said he hopes the index spurs other companies to share insights on how workers are using their models, giving policymakers a more comprehensive picture.
Slow down job displacement by helping American workers better understand how AI can augment their tasks now. That at least gives more people a legit shot at navigating this transition. Encourage CEOs to educate themselves and their workers.
Most members of Congress are woefully uninformed about the realities of AI and its effect on their constituents. Better-informed public officials can help better inform the public. A joint committee on AI or more formal briefings for all lawmakers would be a start. Same at the local level.
Begin debating policy solutions for an economy dominated by superhuman intelligence. This ranges from job retraining programmes to innovative ways to spread wealth creation by big AI companies if Amodei’s worst fears come true. “It’s going to involve taxes on people like me, and maybe specifically on the AI companies,” the Anthropic boss told us.
A policy idea Amodei floated with us is a “token tax”: Every time someone uses a model and the AI company makes money, perhaps 3 per cent of that revenue “goes to the government and is redistributed in some way.”
“Obviously, that’s not in my economic interest,” he added. “But I think that would be a reasonable solution to the problem.” And if AI’s power races ahead the way he expects, that could raise trillions of dollars.
The bottom line: “You can’t just step in front of the train and stop it,” Amodei says. “The only move that’s going to work is steering the train — steer it 10 degrees in a different direction from where it was going. That can be done. That’s possible, but we have to do it now.”
(Concluded)
Mike is the Co-Founder and Jim is the CEO of American news website Axios