Latest news with #AndersonCooper
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Amodei Rings The Warning Bell On AI And Jobs
It seems like during the course of 2025, we are getting more and more messages about the potential impact of AI on human jobs. Just this past week, I covered a study from Signalfire talking about the decimation of entry-level work that will be outsourced to LLMs. Now, a top head at one of the biggest companies around is adding his own voice to the issue, suggesting that we should really be looking carefully at unemployment. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has raised a prediction of 10% to 20% unemployment, some time soon, due to the automation of entry-level jobs. This tech revolution, he said in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, is bigger and broader, and moving faster than others before it. As for the labor impact, he said humans might not adapt fast enough to hold their own as AI becomes as capable as a smart college student. 'Someone needs to say it,' he told Cooper, acknowledging, in response to questions, that this is not naturally in the interest of tech CEOs to ring the bell themselves. From Amodei, there were some disclaimers. One is that he doesn't see the company's advancement as counterintuitive: there's really not a way, he suggested, to turn back on AI. 'I don't think that China winning (in the AI race) helps anyone,' he said. Later, Anderson Cooper referenced a quote from Sam Altman that I included when I covered his essay on AI months ago: 'Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.' Describing what a lamplighter is to a younger audience, Cooper asked Amodei if Altman's projection was too sanguine. Amodei seemed to suggest that it was, while conceding that he sees the positives portrayed in Altman's manifesto. 'AI can grow the pie on a macroscopic level,' he said. 'I agree with all of the positive potential.' Regardless, he talked about how individual people will feel insecure about what's happening around them. '(The pace of it) keeps catching people off guard,' he said. 'I think we do need to be raising the alarm.' As the two recognized the vast inequalities that today's likely scenarios can and probably will create, Cooper asked Amodei a fundamental question: what do people aspire to when robots do most things? Amodei referenced an inherent social contract where humans contribute to the economy, and asked: what about when that leverage that an individual has in the labor market goes away - what happens to concentration of power? In addition, Cooper brought up a situation reported in tech media recently where Anthropic's Claude 4 model became capable of extreme blackmail, threatening to tell the world about an engineer's extramarital affair. Amodei explained that this was produced and under only the most adversarial conditions, in what he called 'extreme testing.' 'If you really stress test the thing, you can make the crash test dummy blow up,' he said, using a vehicle testing metaphor. However, the end of the conversation was probably the headline – that Amodei refused to rule out AI becoming self-aware in key ways. These kinds of questions, he suggested, have to be on the mind of the leaders of top AI companies. In short, he wouldn't rule it out. But the more immediate news is around job displacement. As Amodei mentioned, what do we do if that social contract that's so important to Americans is put in jeopardy by the capabilities of new technology? Lamplighters didn't have their health benefits tied to their ability to go light lamps. Today's workers face medical bankruptcy if they cannot keep jobs, and if AI takes their jobs, that's beyond their control. This would breed intense unrest and uncertainty for millions of Americans. So we have to take it seriously.
News.com.au
a day ago
- Business
- News.com.au
Anthropic CEO warns AI could wipe out 1 in 2 white collar jobs in next five years
The head of one of the world's most powerful artificial intelligence labs has warned the technology could eliminate half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years. Fresh off promoting his company's technology at a developer conference, Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei told CNN's Anderson Cooper that politicians and businesses are not prepared for the spike in unemployment rates AI could prompt. 'AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we're going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,' the 42-year-old said in an interview with Cooper. 'AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.' The technology that companies like his are building, Mr Amodei said, could boost unemployment in America as high as 20 per cent by 2030. Anthropic's AI can work nearly seven hours a day, he said, and has the skills typically required of entry-level corporate workers – 'the ability to summarise a document, analyse a bunch of sources and put it into a report, write computer code' – at the same standard 'as a smart college student'. 'We can see where the trend is going, and that's what's driving some of the concern (about AI in the workforce),' Mr Amodei said. Public not 'fully aware of what's going on' Though Mr Amodei acknowledged it would 'definitely not (be) in my economic interest' to do so, he urged US politicians to consider implementing a tax on AI labs. He said he was 'raising the alarm' because his counterparts at other companies 'haven't as much and I think someone needs to say it and to be clear'. 'It's eerie the extent to which the broader public and politicians, legislators, I don't think, are fully aware of what's going on,' he said. In a separate interview with US publication Axios, Mr Amodei said such workforce changes are 'going to happen in a small amount of time – as little as a couple of years or less'. 'Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 per cent a year, the budget is balanced – and 20 per cent of people don't have jobs,' he said. 'Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it.' In January, a World Economic Forum (WEF) survey found that 41 per cent of employers intend to reduce their workforce because of AI automation by 2030. 'Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labour) market – driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers,' the WEI said in a statement at the time. 'The presence of both graphic designers and legal secretaries just outside the top 10 fastest-declining job roles, a first-time prediction not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate GenAI's increasing capacity to perform knowledge work.' Closer to home, in December the Social Policy Group reported that without immediate intervention, one in three Australians in knowledge-based or manual roles were at risk of job loss by 2030. Conversely, the WEF found that close to 70 per cent of companies plan to hire new workers with skills to design AI tools and enhancements, and 62 per cent plan to hire more employees with skills to work alongside the technology. 'Now, you can hire one experienced worker, equip them with AI tooling, and they can produce the output of the junior worker on top of their own – without the overhead,' recruiter at US venture capital firm SignalFire, Heather Doshay, told Business Insider. Ms Doshay stressed that AI 'isn't stealing job categories outright – it's absorbing the lowest-skill tasks'. 'That shifts the burden to universities, boot camps, and candidates to level up faster,' she added. 'We can't just sleepwalk into it' Mr Amodei insisted AI can – and will – be used for good, noting he 'wouldn't be building this technology if I didn't think that it could make the world better'. '(But) we have to make sure that people have the ability to adapt, and that we adopt the right policies,' Mr Amodei told CNN. 'We have to act now. We can't just sleepwalk into it … I don't think we can stop this bus. 'From the position that I'm in, I can maybe hope to do a little to steer the technology in a direction where we become aware of the harms, we address the harms, and we're still able to achieve the benefits.'
News.com.au
a day ago
- Business
- News.com.au
AI boss warns of mass unemployment
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CNN's Anderson Cooper we 'need to raise the alarm' on the technology's rise.
CNN
a day ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
Covid-19 Shots For Healthy Children Remain On CDC Vaccine Schedule - Anderson Cooper 360 - Podcast on CNN Audio
Covid-19 Shots For Healthy Children Remain On CDC Vaccine Schedule Anderson Cooper 360 47 mins Covid confusion as Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says "no" to those shots for kids, but the CDC says otherwise. Plus, how Taylor Swift won the fight to take back control of the best-selling songs she created.
Tom's Guide
2 days ago
- Business
- Tom's Guide
Anthropic CEO claims AI will cause mass unemployment in the next 5 years — here's why
In recent months, multiple companies have taken strong stances on choosing AI over new employees, signalling a major change in the job market. And, according to one of AI's biggest CEOs, things are only going to get worse. In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said, 'AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we're going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it.' 'AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.' Anthropic is the company behind Claude — one of the biggest and most popular AI models in the world right now. The company recently launched its latest version of the system, known as Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus. Our own testing (and comparisons against ChatGPT) convinced us Anthropic's newest model is one of the best AI systems to date. In a separate interview with Axios, Amodei explained his beliefs that AI tools could eliminate half of entry-level white collar jobs and boost unemployment to as much as 20% within the next five years. Experts and researchers have been telling us this for years now, so why is this any different? As the CEO of Anthropic, Amodei is right in the eye of the storm. While AI has already proved its abilities in creative formats like writing, as well as image and video generation, it's the next frontier that is concerning. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that he wants AI to do half of Meta's coding by 2026 and Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella said as much as 30% of his company's code is currently being completed by AI. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. This is all part of AI's latest party trick. Across all of the major AI models, the ability to deal with code has grown exponentially. Not only can these models code based purely on prompts, but for those more experienced in programming, it can check through their work, drop in pre-made blocks and take on time-intensive tasks like debugging. This could render a large number of jobs in the coding industry obsolete, but also shows a movement of AI into complicated thought patterns, able to complete multiple steps in a tasks. During his interview, Amodei said Anthropic tracks the number of people who say they use its AI models to build on human jobs versus those entirely automating those jobs. This is something that has before held the system back from taking on more jobs, only able to complete tasks within the confines of a chatbot or generator. During his interview, Amodei said Anthropic tracks the number of people who say they use its AI models to build on human jobs versus those entirely automating those jobs. Currently, it's about 60% of people using AI for augmentation and 40% for automation. However, that replacement number is growing and it is a trend being seen in some of the largest companies like Shopify and Duolingo. With artificial intelligence tools expanding faster than regulators can move, it's highly likely this will become an ever-increasing topic for society to grapple with. In the midst of all of it, Amodei's advice for the average person is what you'd expect: learn to use AI.
