Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company that runs the Claude artificial intelligence model, has stepped out of line from his peers and confirmed a crisis hiding in plain sight. While the industry and governments minimise the threat of AI, claiming that it will only take over menial, clerical, repetitive functions, Amodei recently said that it is very likely to wipe out white-collar jobs and deepen unemployment, especially among young people.
For example, AIs seem to be better persuaders than people. In September 2024, chatbots were reported to be good at debunking fake news and persuading conspiracy theorists to see sense. It was an important finding, since urban legends are used to amp up divisive politics. In April, researchers at the University of Zurich covertly addressed the popular subreddit, r/changemyview, via AI chatbots to see how efficiently large language models can persuade people. The forum performs an important function in highly polarised times, reminding people that it is normal to have multiple viewpoints. Concealment made the experiment controversial, but its draft report found that AIs are three to six times more persuasive than humans.
In May, researchers at Lausanne pitted 900 people against human and AI debaters to discuss points like the utility of school uniforms and the value of AI. They found that when AIs know something about their opponents, they are formidable persuaders. Now that clever people know this, AIs could be deployed in prestige roles as lobbyists, political campaign managers and marketers of all things from missiles to toothpaste. Dare we say, religion, too?
This is not how it was supposed to play out. From the Industrial Revolution until the late 20th century, from the age of steam to that of silicon, machines have been presented as labour-saving devices whose most valuable product is leisure. But since mechanisation was a purely Western project, European ideas like utility applied. In the narrative about the golden age of machines, even the time freed up by reducing drudgery was supposed to have utility―it would give everyone the opportunity to create art and culture. Unemployment and underemployment would be wellsprings of creativity.
But if work remains a marker of identity―consider how profession is embedded in South Asian caste names, and in English surnames like Carpenter and Carter―leisure spells erasure, not creation. Ironically, chronic unemployment is a feature of booming economies like India and China.
Urban families were typically bankrolled by a sole breadwinner. In the 1980s, yuppie aspiration created families called DINKs (double income no kids) and DINKYs (Y for ‘yet’). Now, double income with kids is becoming the urban norm. Seen through the lens of women’s participation in the workforce, it is a positive development. But it also points to the soaring cost of living―while one income could finance a family earlier, it now takes two. And someone who does not work has no identity.
This erasure will be deepened if AI culls jobs on a scale not seen for decades―and across the rank and file this time. AI was supposed to take over basic and repetitive tasks, leaving workers free to supervise machines or turn to higher things. Exactly the opposite is happening. AIs can write words and code, create images from words, analyse gigantic datasets and work in mathematics, science and music. Because they learn by mimicry, they can even write poetry and literary fiction in the manner of acclaimed writers.
But for want of manual dexterity, AIs are no good for everyday work. They can make fast food because it’s standardised, but they can’t make a home-cooked meal. Disappointingly, while the household robot has been a stock character in science fiction, intelligent machines can’t perform any household function reliably, except for keeping floors somewhat clean.
Jobs deemed to be low-quality may prove to be durable while a lot of white-collar roles go to machines. Even industries like the press, which depend heavily on human instincts and originality, are being affected. The buzz is about ‘liquid content’―text, graphics and other components formatted to be widely shared, which can be decanted into various formats and channels. Until fairly recently in India, there were curbs on cross-media holdings for fear that media houses would do precisely this, narrowing the variety of news sources and opinion. Besides, it was assumed that the ‘nose for news’ on which the whole business runs is a uniquely human attribute. But some Nordic media houses are training their own AIs by a simple process: their desk staff give a thumbs up or thumbs down to incoming news to teach the AI to be a news editor.
The most persuasive evidence that AIs could take white-collar jobs comes from changing attitudes to universal basic income. The idea dates back to Thomas Paine in the late 18th century and enjoys some popularity in times of economic uncertainty. At other times, it has been dismissed as a handout. But over the last decade, as AI has surged, it is again being talked up. Elites drive policy everywhere, including in technology, and the change could suggest that they know that their own AIs could make them redundant.
Speakeasy
Pratik Kanjilal | Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)