Dario Amodei warns AI may cause ‘unusually painful’ disruption to jobs

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has issued a fresh warning about how AI will disrupt the job market, saying it will cause “unusually painful” disruption.

The AI chief, who co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister Daniela Amodei and is behind the creation of the AI chatbot Claude, warned AI would destroy half of all white-collar jobs last year. The issue has divided opinion among business and tech leaders. Amodei’s warning prompted Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang to say he “thinks AI is so scary, but only [Anthropic] should do it.”

On Monday, Amodei published a roughly 20,000-word essay arguing the risks AI poses are not being taken seriously and warning the technology will lead to a “shock” to the job market, bigger than any before.

Amodei set out what he regards as the potential harms of AI, including the tech becoming autonomous and unpredictable, bad actors or terrorist groups using it to create bio-weapons, and some countries creating a “global totalitarian dictatorship” by exploiting AI to gain disproportionate power.

“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,” Amodei wrote.

In the essay, he elaborated on his argument that humans will find it difficult to recover from AI’s impact on the labor market in the short-term.

“New technologies often bring labor market shocks, and in the past, humans have always recovered from them, but I am concerned that this is because these previous shocks affected only a small fraction of the full possible range of human abilities, leaving room for humans to expand to new tasks,” Amodei said.

“AI will have effects that are much broader and occur much faster, and therefore I worry it will be much more challenging to make things work out well,” he added.