The invention of electricity made menial jobs like the lamplighter, the elevator operator, and the knocker-up, the human equivalent to the modern alarm clock, irrelevant. The computer rendered the data entry clerk, the switchboard operator, and file clerks obsolete.
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (AI) company that emerged in 2026 as an existential threat to billions of market value, with each breathtaking new capability from its Claude model, is back with a warning about just how obsolete AI tools could make whole swathes of work. The AI giant, founded by former OpenAI workers who were obsessed with AI safety just as much as advancement, has been a thought leader on AI risk as much as advancement, and just published a study with the most detailed map yet of which jobs AI is actively performing versus which it merely could perform. The gap between those two numbers is both reassuring and alarming, depending on your line of work.
