The leaders of AI companies often compare their technology to industrial automation: just as machines eliminated jobs that depended on human brawn, AI will eliminate jobs that rely on brains. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested on multiple occasions that his AI-based tools will automate half of entry-level white-collar jobs. Not to be outdone, Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, predicted in February that AI will deliver “human-level performance on most if not all professional tasks” within the next twelve to eighteen months.
As I recently discussed on an AI Reality Check episode of my podcast, however, some of these same leaders have started pulling back from automation discourse.
Two weeks ago, while appearing at a conference in Australia, Sam Altman said that he was “delighted” to be wrong about AI creating a “jobs apocalypse.” And Amodei is now saying that AI won’t replace jobs but will instead replace large parts of existing jobs, changing what employees do in their roles.
If automation is the wrong analogy, what could be better? In my most recent article for The New Yorker, which is titled “Instead of Taking Your Job, A.I. Might Transform It”, I investigated possible answers.
I open the article by discussing a summer job I had in high school. I worked at a corporate office park, programming custom web-based applications for internal use at a management consulting firm. These weren’t polished pieces of software, but I could hack them together quickly, and they solved annoying problems. One application managed timesheets. Another tracked inventory for the IT department.
I then describe what I learned interviewing several small business owners who were making heavy use of AI. I asked them how exactly they were deploying this technology. What I discovered reminded me of my high school job: they were using AI to vibe code quick-and-dirty tools to simplify various parts of their operations.
As I wrote:
“These examples were not the digital equivalent of a power loom, making large numbers of human jobs superfluous. Turns out, A.I. was assisting these small businesses in roughly the same way that my teen-age self had helped that consulting company—by hacking together whatever was useful.”
I end the piece on a somewhat hopeful note.“[S]o far, we don’t seem to be hurtling toward the darker vision of a workforce hollowed out by this technology,” I conclude. “My summer job in New Jersey, all those years ago, didn’t put any consultants out of work. I like to think that it just made their efforts a little deeper.”
For more details on what’s really happening with AI in actual companies, including the emergence of a new strategy called “freestyle work,” read my full article. For now, though, I wanted to leave you with the idea that while AI is undeniably starting to impact the knowledge sector, it is doing so in ways that are both weirder and less dire than we were predicting.
