Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Anthropic sues the Pentagon over supply chain risk designation…Yann LeCun raises $1 billion for his new startup…Some reassuring and not so reassuring news about AI agents’ propensity for illicit scheming…and why it may be too soon to turn all coding over to AI agents.
Two of the questions I get most frequently when I tell people that I cover AI and wrote a book on the subject is: am I going to lose my job? And, what should my kids study?
These questions are difficult to answer. I often fall back on saying that I doubt there will be mass unemployment, which is not the same thing as saying your particular job is safe. And I say that it is important to teach kids to be lifelong learners, which isn’t a very satisfying response.
So far, few people have lost their jobs directly due to AI. Even some of the layoffs that companies have ascribed to AI, such as the recent draconian layoffs at the payments firm Block, seem to be, at least partly, “AI-washing”—attributing layoffs to AI, because it makes a company look tech savvy, when the real reason is due to business headwinds or unrelated bad decisions. Block, for example, tripled its workforce during the pandemic, and many suspect it is simply trying to slim down a bloated workforce. (Block’s CFO Amrita Ahuja told my Fortune colleague Sheryl Estrada that this was not true and that AI was rapidly improving employee productivity.)
Every previous technology has, in the long-run, created more jobs than it has destroyed. But still, some insist that AI is different because it is being adopted so broadly and so quickly across different industries, and because it is hitting at the core of our competitive advantage over machines—our intelligence. As to the second question, about what kids should study, that’s tough too because while previous technologies have created more jobs than they’ve eliminated, exactly what those new jobs will be has always been difficult to predict in advance. It wasn’t obvious, for instance, when smartphones first appeared, that social media influencers would be a viable career.
A new research paper from economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory at the AI company Anthropic assesses how exposed various professions are to AI by looking at the percentage of tasks in that field that the technology could potentially automate. They also try to gauge the gap between this total possible exposure, and the extent to which AI is currently being used to automate those tasks, a measure they call “observed exposure.”
