English transcript

So, just to back up a bit, I've been working on AI for 10 years, and probably the thing I've noticed most about it is how fast it's making progress.

Two years ago, it was at the level of a smart high school student. Now, it's probably at the level of a smart college student and reaching beyond that.

And on one hand, I think there's a number of very positive things that are going to happen. I used to be a biologist.

I think AI has exactly the kind of skills that are needed to cure important diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, to provide cheaper energy, many positive things.

But exactly those same kind of skills, things like summarizing a document, brainstorming, putting together a financial report,

makes me worry a lot that entry-level jobs in areas like finance, consulting, tech, many other areas like that,

entry-level white-collar work, I worry that those things are going to be first augmented, but before long, replaced by AI systems,

and that we may indeed, it's hard to predict the future, but we may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hands

as the pipeline for these early-stage white-collar work starts to contract and dry up.

What's the timeline here?

Yeah, so it's very hard to predict these things, given how fast AI is making progress.

But I would not be surprised if somewhere between one and five years, we started to see big effects here.

I've heard a number of people talk about this in private, AI CEOs talk about this in private,

CEOs of other companies talk about this in private, and I really felt that the message that this is happening

hasn't been getting out to ordinary people, hasn't been getting out to our legislators, our congresspeople either,

and so I felt I needed to speak up on the record. I do think that this is something we can prevent this,

but we need to act now. I don't think we can stop the AI bus.

There are six or seven companies just in the U.S. working in this area.

I just run one of them. Even if our company stopped doing what it was doing today,

all the other companies would continue, even if all six companies started, then China would beat us.

I think that's a big and important threat. So we can't stop the bus, but I do think we may have an opportunity to steer it.

And I think we need to get congresspeople, legislators, the public to think about this now.

One of the first steps we're taking is just measuring the effects.

Anthropic has put out something that we call our economic index, and using the economic index,

we try and track the rate at which these things are happening.

At some point, we have to go beyond measuring this to actually taking action to trying to build our AI systems

in a way that augments rather than replaces, but that won't be a long-term solution either.

We need to think about what the government is going to do.

And there's a wide range of actions that the government could take,

and it's not my place to decide which of those are correct,

but I think the first step is people need to think about this and start taking it very seriously.

Yeah, and you're talking about AI possibly wiping out all entry-level white-collar jobs

and spiking unemployment to 10 to 20 percent.

So dive into the mitigation of this a little bit more.

How could we mitigate the worst possible scenario here?

Yeah, so it's hard to know the exact numbers.

I mean, you know, I don't have a crystal ball.

I can't predict the future, but what I will say is I think what AI can do,

there have been these technological changes in the past, but I think what's different about AI

is it's broader, it's deeper, and it's moving faster than previous such technologies.

And so in terms of mitigations, I think one is just educating people in order to use AI.

There will always be people who are using AI and helping our workers to adapt faster,

I think is an important move.

A second move is that we may want government to kind of find a way to level the economic

playing field.

And this may be a controversial proposal, but something like taxing AI companies like us,

we may need to get to the other extreme.

And that's a very interesting message coming from you, who runs an AI company.

But you're doing a public service announcement for all of us

in terms of this future concern.

Dario, thank you so much for joining us.