The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses

As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei forecasts mass job loss, Business Insider lays off staff and embraces AI

Like a lot of figureheads in the AI industry, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that ordinary people are not ready for the changes AI is about to unleash on the world. In a widely circulated interview with Axios this week, Amodei warns we are on the brink of what his interviewers describe as a “job apocalypse” that will wipe out half of entry level jobs and cause the unemployment rate to rise up to 20%. People are unprepared, Amodei says. "Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen.” But before we know it, “cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced—and 20% of people don't have jobs."

On Thursday, Business Insider’s CEO Barbara Peng announced that the company was laying off 21% of its staff and in the same announcement that it was “going all-in on AI.” According to my sources, in addition to hitting some reporters, the cuts largely impacted copywriters—a job that has been targeted for replacement with AI by many companies over the last two years. Peng noted that 70% of Insider employees use its enterprise AI systems, and that they’re trying to get that up to 100%. Alex Springer, BI’s parent company, has a deal with OpenAI that licenses its content to the AI company and gives it access to AI tech.

Is this a sign of Amodei’s AI jobs apocalypse at hand?

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I guess it depends on how you define “AI jobs apocalypse.” The way that AI executives and business leaders want you to define it is something like ‘an unstoppable phenomenon in which consumer technology itself inexorably transforms the economy in a way that forces everyone to be more productive, for them’.

As such, perhaps we should maybe pump the brakes here and look at what’s actually going on, which is more like ‘large technology firms are selling automation software to Fortune 500 companies, executives, and managers who are then deciding to use that automation technology to fire their workers or reduce their hours.’ There is nothing elemental or preordained about this. The “AI jobs apocalypse” is bosses like Barbara Peng deciding to lay off reporters and copywriters and highlighting her commitment to AI while she is doing so.

From what I’ve been told, “AI” isn’t really making much of an impact on BI reporters’ daily working lives, though they do have access to Grammarly, editing software that predates ChatGPT and generative AI products. But traffic at Business Insider is down, just like it is at many, many news orgs right now, in part because discovery from search is down—because ChatGPT and Google AI Overview have buried links to their stories. And there’s an incentive to put BI’s partnership with OpenAI in a positive light.

So instead of, say, pushing back on the way tech companies are taking news orgs’ work and reproducing it on their platform via AI snippets and overviews—capturing user loyalty and ad revenue in the process—most media bosses have decided to partner with those companies and to, say, fire copywriters in the wake of declining revenue streams. This may be somewhat reductive, but these are all human decisions, even when they are made from a menu of all-bad options. And management, more often than not, will align with the interests of the money—represented here by the AI companies—over their workers. Same as it ever was.

Look, I know that this can feel apocalyptic and insurmountable. Hell I was laid off by a media company that then sought to increase its value by adding AI tools to the columns like those I used to write. But I cannot emphasize enough that this is exactly how the AI companies want us all to think. That AI, in the precise form that they are selling it, is inevitable. Adapt or be left behind. The economy will be totally transformed. Get on board, or lose your competitive advantage. Be stranded when the AI jobs apocalypse hits.

But of course there is no AI jobs apocalypse—an apocalypse is catastrophic, terminal, predetermined—but there are bosses with great new incentives/justifications for firing people, for cutting costs, for speeding up work. There is, to split hairs for a minute, a real AI jobs crisis, but that crisis is born of executives like Peng, CEOs like Duolingo’s Louis von Ahn and Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski all buying what Amodei (and Sam Altman, and the rest of the new AI enthusetariat) is selling. Amodei and the rest are pushing not just automation tools, but an entire new permission structure for enacting that job automation—and a framework that presents the whole phenomenon as outside their control.

Dario Amodei at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2023. Image: Flickr. CC 2.0

And man, is it working! Just look at how Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, the CEO and executive editor of Axios, respectively, *absolutely lap up* Amodei’s pronouncements. They are completely sold! The tone of the whole article is that of eager students furiously nodding along, pausing to get some agreement from [checking notes here, ah yes] Steve Bannon, before issuing the following disclosure at the bottom of the article:

Full disclosure: At Axios, we ask our managers to explain why AI won't be doing a specific job before green-lighting its approval. (Axios stories are always written and edited by humans.) Few want to admit this publicly, but every CEO is or will soon be doing this privately. Jim wrote a column last week explaining a few steps CEOs can take now.

Here is an excerpt from Jim’s column, about what he’s doing at Axios to “prepare people” for the age of AI:

We tell most staff they should be spending 10% or more of their day using AI to discover ways to double their performance by the end of the year. Some, like coders, should shoot for 10x-ing productivity as AI improves.

Mr. VandeHei could not possibly illustrate my point any more thoroughly if he 10x-ed his descriptive powers with AI. The message is this: There is an AI jobs apocalypse coming, everything is going to change, and if you hope to survive it, you’re going to have to learn to be a lot more productive, for me, your boss. How a reporter is supposed to use AI to “double their performance” without generating articles outright remains undisclosed. That’s a lot of summarized emails.

But the mindset is prevailing, if VandeHei is to be believed: “we're betting [AI] approximates the hype in the next 18 months to three years,” he writes. “And so are most CEOs and top government officials we talk to, even if they're strangely silent about it in public.”

And that’s a real crisis, in my view! This AI automation mania pushes bosses to train the crosshairs on anything and everything that isn’t built to optimize corporate efficiency, and as a result, you get the journalism layoffs, the Duolingo cuts; you get DOGE. As I wrote a couple weeks ago about the REAL AI jobs crisis:

The AI jobs crisis does not, as I’ve written before, look like sentient programs arising all around us, inexorably replacing human jobs en masse. It’s a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations. The AI jobs crisis is not any sort of SkyNet-esque robot jobs apocalypse—it’s DOGE firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of “an AI-first strategy.”

If AI turns out to be able to do half of what its staunchest advocates say it can, isn’t its immense power an opportunity to decide for ourselves the kind of jobs that we think are important for a society to have? Why are we limited to playing defense against the whims of those carrying out this AI jobs apocalypse, the executives and the managerial class? The answer is pretty simple: That’s who the AI jobs apocalypse is for!

Which is why visions like Amodei’s wind up underlining how impoverished his cohort’s visions for the future really are: Here is a technology that he believes is the most transformational thing since electricity or whatever, capable of doing hundreds of millions of humans’ jobs within the next few years, and all he can suggest is that governments should “prepare” for the job loss, and maybe institute a 3% tax on AI. Altman used to talk a little bit about a universal basic income—the bare minimum for gesturing towards an interest in the lives of the losers of the AI automation era—but he doesn’t even do that anymore. Now it’s nothing, except the occasional grim suggestion that the social contract itself might have to be rewritten in the AI companies’ favor.

Nothing better clarifies the nature of these projects more than Amodei and Altman proclaiming their technologies will soon be able to do everyone’s jobs on earth—but that vast swaths of those people are probably doomed to be miserable. Not them, though. They will be rich.

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PS I know I am maybe not helping by running a project called AI Killed My Job, but the idea for that was I’d include the ways that AI has degraded or ‘killed’ jobs beyond eliminating them, too, and also ‘The Bosses Used AI to Kill My Job’ just felt too long! I’ll share some of the stories from that project next week.

As always, thanks for reading, and hammers up.