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Title: CNN Challenges Claim AI Will Eliminate Half of White-Collar Jobs,
Calls It 'Part of the AI Hype Machine'

Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/043920...

Thursday Anthropic's CEO/cofounder Dario Amodei again warned unemployed could
spike 10 to 20% within the next five years as AI potentially eliminated half
of all entry-level white-collar jobs. But CNN's senior business writer
dismisses that as "all part of the AI hype machine," pointing out that Amodei
"didn't cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate." And that was
just one of many of the wild claims he made that are increasingly part of a
Silicon Valley script: AI will fix everything, but first it has to ruin
everything. Why? Just trust us. In this as-yet fictional world, "cancer is
cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced - and 20% of
people don't have jobs," Amodei told Axios, repeating one of the industry's
favorite unfalsifiable claims about a disease-free utopia on the horizon,
courtesy of AI. But how will the US economy, in particular, grow so robustly
when the jobless masses can't afford to buy anything? Amodei didn't say...
Anyway. The point is, Amodei is a salesman, and it's in his interest to make
his product appear inevitable and so powerful it's scary. Axios framed
Amodei's economic prediction as a "white-collar bloodbath." Even some AI
optimists were put off by Amodei's stark characterization. "Someone needs to
remind the CEO that at one point there were more than (2 million)
secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in office dictation,"
wrote tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Bluesky. "They were the original white
collar displacements. New companies with new jobs will come from AI and
increase TOTAL employment." Little of what Amodei told Axios was new, but it
was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to
Anthropic's work, days after it released a major model update to its Claude
chatbot, one of the top rivals to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Amodei told CNN Thursday
this great societal change would be driven by how incredibly fast AI
technology is getting better and better - and that the AI boom "is bigger and
it's broader and it's moving faster than anything has before...!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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