- Anthropic cofounders continue to warn that AI could soon replace a lot of human jobs.
- CEO Dario Amodei said he felt it was necessary to speak up due to the likelihood of disruption.
- Jack Clark, Anthropic's head of policy, said a policy response is needed.
Two cofounders of Anthropic haven't been shy with warnings about how AI could wipe out jobs.
CEO Dario Amodei and Jack Clark, who is head of policy at the AI research company, gave more insight into those warnings during an Axios event on Wednesday, saying they felt compelled to be honest.
"As with most things, when an exponential is moving very quickly, you can't be sure," Amodei said at the Axios AI+ DC Summit. "I think it is likely enough to happen that we felt there was a need to warn the world about it and to speak honestly."
Clark said a policy response was needed due to "the scale of disruption we expect in the next five years."
The Anthropic leaders are among the tech and business leaders who have warned that AI will replace human jobs, especially entry-level office jobs.
Amodei told Axios in May that he thinks AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. He also predicted that the unemployment rate could jump to somewhere between 10% and 20% in that timeframe. He told the BBC earlier this month that the AI-induced entry-level job losses could occur in fields like law, finance, and consulting.
Amodei was asked about his (p)doom number, a term used to signal how likely it is that AI will destroy humanity. He also told Axios on Wednesday that he thinks there's a 25% chance the AI will go "really, really badly," and that there's a "75% chance that things go really, really well."
