Monologue: The AI Job Loss Con

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Hello, and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

You best bet, I'm your host, Ed Zitrom.

Now, this week you've probably heard some scary numbers that 50% of all white-collar jobs will be replaced in the next one to five years.

And it's come directly from despicable carnival barker Dario Amadei.

I like calling him Wario.

It's funny.

He's the CEO of Anthropic and he repeated this egregious lie to both Axios and CNN leading to the most of the rest of the media just quoting it adverbatum without thinking.

Now to be specific, he said that AI would wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next one to five years.

It's always this fucking, he always says like, oh, it's like one year or like five years.

I don't know, mate.

How am I meant to know?

I'm just making shit up.

And this is the entire quote, by the way, the fundament of at least 30 different news stories and an egregious line of shit.

Now, to quote the excellent Alison Morrow of CNN, Amadei didn't cite any research or evidence to that 50% estimate.

And she added that Amade is a salesman, and it's in his interest to make his product appear to be inevitable and so powerful it's scary.

And that little of what Amadei told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropic's work.

I've said it once and I'll say it again.

Alison Morrow may be one of the best living business reporters.

Everyone should be taking notes from her.

She is the best.

She was on the price gouging, she's been on AI.

She's really incredible.

I'm saying this because Alison's been on the show and she rocks, she'll be back, and also because I'm pretty critical of the media and need to give credit where it's due.

Now, in the same week, Oxford Economics put out a report about how entry-level workers were facing a job crisis and vaguely mentioned in the preview of the report that there are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates, causing Axios to run an article claiming that there was now hard evidence that AI was driving job loss.

I should also add, Kevin Ruse, you know, the marketing intern that also runs the New York Times column, he just quoted that ad verbatim.

Like, that's the exact quote he used in a story in the New York Times.

Didn't even bother opening the fucking thing.

Now, one might think anyway that the report would have like, I don't know, hard evidence based on what Axios said, and you'd be wrong.

On the very first page, it says that there are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates.

On page three, it claims that the high adoption rates by information companies, along with the sheer employment declines in some roles since 2022, suggested some displacement effect from AI.

And digging deeper, the largest displacement seems to be entry-level jobs normally filled by recent graduates.

And that is the whole argument.

That some roles that could maybe be automated with generative AI have seen declines in employment, and so-called information companies have been adopting AI at supposed and undisclosed rates, meaning that AI has taken these jobs.

Do these companies actually replace workers with AI?

Who knows?

No need to bother checking that or whether one can actually replace any of these roles with AI.

Post the report.

Done.

Sold.

Go home.

Smoke a cigarette.

You did it, champ.

You put out your fucking report.

Even if the report's bullshit, actually, the rest of the report's pretty good.

It's just this weird bit.

I'm pretty sure they just did 4PR.

They knew that people would just go, oh my godness.

Oh my goodness.

AI's taking the jobs.

I must cover that.

Except the people doing it on old people.

They're people.

I'm 39 years old.

They're my age, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger.

It's fucking terrifying.

And like, while there are absolutely some jobs being taken by AI, there is to this point little or no research that suggests that it's happening at scale.

And I must be clear that I don't want this to happen.

I'm just saying tell the fucking truth.

The easiest way to prove me wrong, by the way, would be to find an actual company that's done it.

Show me a company that has actually replaced full employees with generative AI.

Show me the job that the AI is doing and how it is doing it and then the output that it creates.

Do not bring me a goddamn call center.

I swear to Christ, they've been trying to automate those since they invented them.

They've already been doing automation before large language models.

If anyone actually looked into anything in technology, they would know the companies have been doing this already.

It makes me feel insane.

And you can't show me this because it isn't fucking happening.

And I'm sick of people pretending it is.

These articles do not serve the public.

They do not inform the public.

They are propaganda for companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft to pretend that their software does more than it can now or ever will so that they can continue raising billions of dollars or raising their market caps.

The media refuses to dig too deep because doing so would move against the will of the markets and their editors.

Or worse still, they just don't care enough to check whether what they're saying is true.

It's the same insincere, craven bullshit we saw with the metaverse, with crypto, with the return return to office demands of 2021 and 2022 with quiet quitting with companies price gouging and blaming it on inflation reporters are far too willing to follow exactly what they think the world wants to read rather than actually sharing the truth or learning anything themselves and my next episode is going to be a three-parter about why I think this keeps happening Our economy is dominated by people that are fully disconnected from the world around them, that buy things and sell things for other people that are disconnected too.

I I call them business idiots and they're everywhere.

And I can't wait to tell you all about them next week.

They turn my bloody stomach.

But I love you listeners and you're gonna love this.

Be honest, how many tabs do you have open right now?

Too many?

Sounds like you need close all tabs from KQED, where I, Morgan Sung, Doom Scroll so you don't have to.

Every week, we scour the internet to bring you deep dives that explain how the digital world connects and divides us all.

Everyone's cooped up in their house.

I will talk to this robot.

If you're a truly engaged activist, the government already has data on you.

Driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Listen to Close All Tabs, wherever you get your podcasts.

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