Are you about to lose your job to AI?

Read time: 6 mins

In brief…

• There have been warnings of a “jobs bloodbath” due to the rapid growth of AI, specifically for white-collar workers, but Jack Clark of Anthropic believes with the right policies from governments, it could have a massive benefit for society.
• Clark believes AI and AGI can produce a future where society is more focused on education and healthcare, while technology brings benefits to science and industry.
• He says governments need to engage more comprehensively with the tech companies, and that more people need to be involved in public debate on how AI is implemented.

What’s the story?

The age of AI is upon us, with people tagging @Grok on X to answer any question that comes to mind, and both students and teachers using ChatGPT in education.

There have even been circumstances of AI generated articles flooding the journalism landscape with false stories about people who don’t exist, and situations that never happened.

The UK government has pledged £2 billion of investment into the UK’s AI potential to develop home-grown companies that can maximise the potential of this rapidly advancing tech.

But alongside these developments – for better or worse – comes concerns about how AI will impact the jobs market for anyone who works in the digital landscape, or any role that involves software.

There have been warnings of a jobs “bloodbath” in coming years, particularly among white-collar workers.

In a world where we’ve seen tech billionaires take control of social media companies, and harvest our personal data for their own gain, there is understandable concern about the people who control the future of AI.

But not all of these companies are prioritising profit over people, with the masterminds behind US-based firm Anthropic claiming to be dedicating its advances, and those of its Claude system, to producing tangible benefits for the world, instead of simply swapping humans for tech in computer based roles.

Jack Clark, co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic, tells The News Agents that Anthropic’s priority is to ensure the global transition to this new world is implemented in a way which benefits everyone.

“We see our job as to try and build systems that exhibit what we want out of this technology, and to tell people in a straightforward and honest manner about the risks as well as the benefits of this technology,” he says, sitting in Anthropic’s head office in San Francisco.

Anthropic specifically deals with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which can adapt to different situations, and essentially teach itself to work beyond the commands from human operatives.

Are we facing a jobs ‘bloodbath’?

In many instances throughout history, economic advances have not resulted in major changes when game-changing technology is introduced, but the speed with which AI and AGI is advancing makes this a more disruptive advancement than ever seen before.

“If the technology continues to get good, we need to be prepared for things that have almost no basis in economic history to happen,” Clark tells Lewis Goodall.

“There's the potential for really abrupt changes to happen that have almost no precedent in the economy.

“We don't see this yet, but what we see is the technology getting much better, much more quickly than people suspected, and showing up in terms of how it's being deployed and changing professions more quickly than people anticipated.”

He says AI and AGI presents both the greatest opportunities for human society, and the greatest risks.

It is important, he adds, for everyone in the AI industry to get things "right" for the population so that implementing this technology across all industries results in a positive outcome.

“One of the huge opportunities here is no matter how good the technology gets, people want to spend time with people, and people want to nurture people and learn from people and educate people,” Clark says.

“I think about my life as a parent and how much joy it brings me to spend time not just with my own kid, but with other kids and other parents and be together in human communities.”

How world leaders need to respond to AI

Change in the employment landscape is inevitable, Clark says, stating the future should be one with more interactive jobs, which he believes will bring huge benefits to society.

“Across the western world, you have too few teachers and too few nurses and too few of what you might think of as human-centric jobs, and we tend to pay these people very poorly,” Clark says.

“We want it to be different because it would be better for there to be more teachers, more nurses, more people working in elder care, and often you're blocked on a combination of skills and also public funding for it.”

He believes the first big shift, and benefit, will come in the world of sciences, where AGI can hugely benefit from automated systems, comparing its application to how society has given control to technology in water systems and power grids.

Clark says the next big step needs to be how AI companies work with governments, and how governments respond to this new technological revolution, which involves more than just throwing money at it.

“It's hard to believe this stuff because it contradicts a lot of what's happened before, and you would be right to be suspicious of it,” he says.

He says it is key to give more “palpable demonstrations” of the positive benefits of AI and AGI, which is currently being held back by the level of expertise needed to understand its progress and potential.

“It's a shame that where this technology is showing up the most profoundly is encoding, which is not something most politicians have great intuitions about,” Clark says.

“It would be super helpful if it was showing up in a more relevant way to policy makers now, because it would help us have that discussion.”

He says the speed with which governments across the world were able to develop Covid vaccines during the 2020 pandemic is testament to how fast governments can move when they need to.

What does the future hold?

Clark is optimistic about the real-world applications of AI – but admits using this technology for the good of all people is not a future certainty.

“The positive future is we get this right,” he says.

“We choose to accelerate large swaths of science. We improve the delivery of public services, we improve the delivery of healthcare. We find ways to improve education.

“We get to enjoy a greater level of abundance as society, and we can improve lots of jobs that are currently bad, but we want to be better and do fewer jobs that are bad.”

He says a more negative reality will emerge if there is no policy response on AI from governments in the short term.

“If technology gets pushed really far with no oversight and no policy framework, and an accident occurs, that could be incredibly damaging and scary,” he adds.

“I don't think it's responsible of me to talk in sci-fi vignettes about all the ways it could be scary, because I don't want to end up there, but that's a potential place you end up without adequate policy oversight and public awareness.”

He is now calling for a greater level of “public transparency and debate” in how AI is set to change our lives.

“This is stuff that affects everyone,” he says.

“It is so important to ask us pointed questions about it and help the public understand that this is a large-scale thing that will affect society, and it's right to ask questions of the companies building the technology.

“The job of companies like mine is to say more about what we see, say more about the technology, and be honest about the weird aspects of it.”

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