Anthropic Researcher Sholto Douglas: Models Will Be Capable Of Automating 95% Of Computer Facing Jobs By 2028, But People Will Continue To Work Well Into The 2030's

Dario Amodei expects computer facing jobs to start being widely automated within the next 2-3 years, But Sholto Douglas implies that despite the fact that models will be capable of automating knowledge workers by 2028, widespread automation might not happen until several years after that. Computer Facing/Knowledge Workers represent about 33% of all jobs in the US. Fundamentally it’s because we’ve wanted to be honest with people. Employment risk is the classic here. I actually disagree with Dario on the pace. I think it’s most likely that compute shortages, diffusion complexity, policy and unmet demand for services mean that even for years after we have models which could automate 95% of computer facing jobs (models will get there in 28), people will work at them (well into 2030s) But I do think we as a society should take the possibility far more seriously than we are now, and prepare contingency policies for what to do at various levels of unemployment (e.g. you could imagine not letting profitable companies lay off more than 5% per year), as well as METR style evals to measure progress on different job families so we have a clear picture. Our opinion has always been that we need to be straight up and honest with people. Do you guys agree that companies should be banned from laying off people to prevent the unemployment rate from going up? I think a better approach would be fat monthly government issued checks to people that are fired due to AI automation. Source: https://x.com/_sholtodouglas/status/2088649063185195258