Anthropic employees are much more convinced than the average citizen about the rapid automation of work. They expect AI to take over the lion's share of their work by 2030, leading to a spike in unemployment and abnormal GDP growth.
Anthropic employees are much more convinced than the average citizen about the rapid automation of work. They expect AI to take over the lion's share of their work by 2030, leading to a spike in unemployment and abnormal GDP growth.
This is evidenced by the results of the study "The AI expectations gap", published by Anthropic. The researchers compared an internal survey of 1,334 of their own employees with a national survey of US adults, Business Insider reports .
Most Anthropic employees believe that AI will perform at least 80% of their jobs by 2030. The median estimate is that AI will take over 95% of the process of creating new models. In contrast, only 5% of average Americans expect a similar level of automation in their field.
Most of the startup’s employees predict that the unemployment rate in the US will exceed 12% by 2030 (currently it is around 4.2%). Average Americans are more optimistic - they believe that the figure will fluctuate around 8%.
Anthropic expects a whopping 17.1% jump in US GDP by 2030 thanks to AI productivity. Average citizens estimate a possible growth of 5.4% (last year’s growth was 2.2%).
Anthropic's chief economist, Peter McCrory, noted that the company is about a year and a half ahead of the general market in terms of AI implementation, so the views of its specialists can serve as a leading indicator for the entire global economy.
Researchers explain the gap in vision of the future by several factors:
Anthropic researchers and engineers have early access to unpublished models and unlimited tooling budgets;
The majority of the population works in manual labor, transportation, or service jobs—people in these professions consider their jobs to be the least vulnerable to automation.
The workers' position is entirely consistent with the predictions of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who previously noted that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level office jobs within five years and push unemployment to 10–20%.
“Artificial intelligence is not just a replacement for specific human professions, it is a general replacement for human labor as such,” emphasizes Dario Amodei, predicting an unprecedented short-term shock to the labor market.
