Latest news with #unemployment
Bloomberg
17 hours ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
US Job Growth Is Seen Moderating on Shifting Trade Policy
By and Craig Stirling Save The pace of US hiring probably slowed in May, with employers focusing on containing costs as households become a bit more guarded and businesses reconsidered investment plans against a backdrop of shifting trade policy. Economists see payrolls rising by 125,000 after job growth in March and April exceeded projections, based on the median of a Bloomberg survey. That would leave the average over the past three months tracking a still-solid 162,000. The unemployment rate is seen holding at 4.2%.
Daily Mail
19 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Tech titan predicts major job crisis as AI takes over
Published: | Updated: A billionaire tech leader has delivered a stark warning about the mass unemployment that could be brought about by artificial intelligence. AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years, according to Dario Amodei, CEO of leading AI company Anthropic. Amodei (pictured) said AI could also soon raise unemployment to 10 to 20 percent. He said the government and AI companies should stop 'sugar-coating' the job apocalypse on the horizon. 'We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,' Amodei told Axios. 'I don't think this is on people's radar.' The billionaire said he is concerned that most Americans are 'unaware that this is about to happen.' 'It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it,' he explained. Major companies have already begun mass layoffs, referencing advances in AI in making roles redundant. Meta recently announced that it is cutting 5 percent of its payroll. Zuckerberg said in a recent interview that the tech giant was developing AI that 'can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.' Amodei has previously warned about the dangers of advancing AI when he signed a 2023 'Statement on AI Risk' open letter. 'Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,' the statement read. Amodei signed the letter alongside other notable AI leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (pictured), Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Other experts have also issued startling warnings. Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, previously told the Financial Times that the 'AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] race is a race towards the edge of a cliff. Even the CEOs who are engaging in the race have stated that whoever wins has a significant probability of causing human extinction in the process, because we have no idea how to control systems more intelligent than ourselves,' Russell added. Earlier this year an Open AI safety researcher labeled the global AI race a 'very risky gamble, with huge downside' for humanity as he dramatically quit his role. Steven Adler led safety-related research and programs for product launches and speculative long-term AI systems for OpenAI before resigning in January. 'I'm pretty terrified by the pace of AI development,' Adler wrote. He also criticized developments that have been quickly taking shape between world-leading AI labs and global superpowers. 'When I think about where I'll raise a future family, or how much to save for retirement, I can't help but wonder: Will humanity even make it to that point?,' he wrote on X.
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.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The labor market is worse than than it appears: Chart of the Week
A string of jobs reports has told a similar story for months now, if you look at the headline numbers. It's a simple narrative: The labor market has cooled significantly over the past several years, but remains overall resilient from a broader slowdown. By subscribing, you are agreeing to Yahoo's Terms and Privacy Policy Next week, the May jobs report is expected to bring more of the same headlines, as it's anticipated to show the US labor market added 130,000 jobs with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.2%. More resiliency. But the story of job hunting in America has been far more bifurcated, masked by these broad figures. Behind the solid headline numbers is a hiring rate hovering near a decade low. So too is the rate at which Americans are quitting their jobs. As Fed Chair Jerome Powell put it on Jan 29, "It's a low hiring environment. So if you have a job, it's all good. But if you have to find a job, [the] hiring rates have come down." It's yet another tale of two economies, and one that's hammering a specific group: recent college grads. With the labor market stuck in neutral, the millions of students who walked off the campus quad for the final time this month are facing a challenging situation. The three-month moving average of the unemployment rate for recent graduates aged 22 to 27 currently sits at roughly 5.3%, well above the national average of 4.2%, per Oxford Economics. As our Chart of the Week shows, this is a historic anomaly. "It's a first sign of hitting a point where the labor market is at kind of a breaking point," Indeed economist Cory Stahle told Yahoo Finance. "Things overall are still solid, but the fact that we're seeing pockets like these younger workers starting to get hit harder is clearly very concerning." The story of these workers, why they aren't finding jobs, and whether or not they eventually will is at the crux of the current US labor market conundrum. "Right now, we're on a trend where we're facing a lot of headwinds," Stahle said. "The labor market is strong, but my prediction right now is some of these headwinds are going to start catching up to us." Big Tech's "efficiency" push has been a key driver of the recent graduate job-hunting slump. Recent research from Apollo Global Management's chief economist Torsten Sløk shows that employment in the Magnificent Seven tech cohort had increased at 13% or higher from 2011 to 2021. In the past three years, employment gains for the group were only around 3% in any given year. And these are the big, wealthy companies that are still growing and driving S&P 500 earnings. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.) This means fewer tech job openings for a generation of college students who have been increasingly majoring in areas like computer science. Job postings on Indeed's platform for software development jobs are down about 40% from February 2020, per Stahle. A far cry from the "learn to code" era. Add in that the broader labor market had already been cooling, many expect President Trump's tariffs to weigh on economic growth, and artificial intelligence is beginning to fill entry-level positions, and Oxford Economics US senior economist Matthew Martin described a "perfect storm" that's keeping college grads on the labor market sidelines. "There's just such a smaller pool of jobs to actually compete for, which means a lot of these recent grads are unfortunately staying unemployed as soon as they enter the labor force," Martin told Yahoo Finance. Martin added that the data isn't large enough to ominously change his economic forecast. But it is one of the dynamics under the surface that has economists predicting the likely path for the unemployment rate from here isn't lower. Josh Schafer is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X @_joshschafer. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
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.'
