AI CEOs and technology leaders are trying to find the right way to talk about the labor market.
Increasingly, they are moving beyond blanket statements about the loss of white-collar jobs that may have fueled the growing AI backlash.
“I’m glad we were wrong on this,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a recent event hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “I would have thought by now that the impact of eliminating entry-level white-collar jobs would be greater than it actually is.”
OpenAI’s CEO said his thoughts began to change when he tried having AI write emails and Slack messages, calling the experience “inhuman” to watch.
“It was the human part of the role, and it refreshed me with the idea that the image of the job is likely to be very different from what we thought it would be, both in a positive and negative sense,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of job apocalypse that some companies in our universe are advocating and talking about.”
Mr. Altman may be the most direct, but he is not the only one trying to turn the page on warnings about massive white-collar job losses.
“I think people are scared because it’s poorly defined and often framed as an inescapable, threatening gray cloud over people’s heads,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman recently said on The Verge’s Decoder podcast.
In February, Suleiman told the Financial Times that “white-collar jobs that involve sitting in front of a computer, such as lawyers, accountants, project managers and marketers, will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Suleiman told The Decoder that his statements had been misunderstood and that he was not actually changing his views. He said he was talking about the work that workers do, such as reading emails, not the actual work of lawyers.
“Subtasks, such as sending an email, talking to a colleague, or creating a PowerPoint, will become increasingly digital and automated, essentially allowing you to generate more subtasks,” he said. “That doesn’t mean the role is completely gone.”
The change in tone and explanation comes at a pivotal moment in AI. On Friday, SpaceX made its Nasdaq debut. OpenAI and Anthropic both confirmed that they are working toward their own IPOs.
At the same time, political opposition is growing. Data centers are rapidly becoming a hot topic.
In June, the city of Seattle passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers. Overall, the industry faces the harsh reality that a technology they claim is one of the greatest advances in human history is deeply unpopular in the United States. An Economist/YouGov poll in May found that 71% of Americans think the pace of AI development is too fast.
Microsoft President Brad Smith said the recent booing of a speaker who spoke about AI at a prestigious university’s graduation ceremony was a “powerful wake-up call for the tech industry.”
Smith said in a lengthy blog post that AI will “take away some jobs,” but the compressed timeline for some predictions will differ from the timeline for similar technological advances.
“Some are looking at the power of AI and predicting its massive adoption in just a few years,” Smith wrote. “There’s always the possibility that this time will be different, but we’ve never seen technology spread at this pace globally.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has become the industry’s leading voice on job loss due to AI. Last year, he warned that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs over the next one to five years. Amodei said there was a reason for the alarm.
“When I have warned about job losses in interviews and essays, it is because I want to give both policymakers and the private sector the best chance to adapt and respond, not because I am trying to be a ‘prophet of doom,'” Amodei said in an essay published Wednesday.
At the same time, Amodei said, “AI will enable many new economic opportunities.”
“I’ve predicted that AI will enable individuals to build multibillion-dollar companies, and I’m already seeing teams of a few people building businesses with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue,” he wrote.