But when the questions turn to AI’s impact on humanity, Amodei’s demeanor shifts. He says that while he is not a doom-and-gloomer, he is certainly worried. Previous disruptions took place over longer timescales, and he frets that the speed and scope of this one will make it much harder to manage. His concern “is that the normal adaptive mechanisms will be overwhelmed” and that more than half of entry-level white-collar jobs are at risk.
As he speaks, Amodei sounds like a physician delivering a difficult prognosis: sober and compassionate, very concerned about the patient’s well-being, but ultimately helpless in the face of death’s inevitable arrival. Except Amodei is not just some powerless observer. He is the chief executive of one of the companies that is doing the most to bring about this jobless future. He is more architect than bystander, but you would never know it from the tone of his public utterances.
Amodei is far from alone in this stance. In the years following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the AI industry’s messaging tended toward the reassuring: AI is not coming to take your jobs; instead, it will be a cognitive exoskeleton that augments workers, making humans more capable and more productive, both in the workplace and beyond.
The Kidnapper’s Ransom
The passive voice is doing a lot of work in these prognostications—jobs will simply “be automated” and roles will just “go away.” The disruption is presented as being like the weather—something we must prepare for, adapt to, endure. Hiding behind this phrasing is a very different reality: These changes are the downstream consequences of decisions made in specific boardrooms by specific people reacting to specific financial incentives.
University of Oxford political philosopher G.A. Cohen identified this pattern of argument decades ago. His insight was that an argument changes its character entirely when the person delivering it is the same person whose choices make the premises true. Cohen’s analogy was vivid: Imagine a kidnapper who argues that children should be with their parents and, therefore, the ransom should be paid. The argument is logically valid. Its premises are true. But it is discredited by the fact that the person making the case is the one who created the crisis.
The AI job crisis is being built, not born
