Dario Amodei

But diffusion affects merely by us time.

And I am not confident they will be as slow as people predict.

Enterprise AI adoption is growing at rates much faster than any previous technology, largely on the pure strength of the technology itself.

Also, even if traditional enterprises are slow to adopt new technology, startups will spring up to serve as glue and make the adoption easier.

If that doesn't work, the startups may simply disrupt the incumbents directly.

That could lead to a world where it isn't so much that specific jobs are disrupted as it is that large enterprises are disrupted in general and replaced with much less labor-intensive startups.

This could also lead to a world of geographic inequality, where an increasing fraction of the world's wealth is concentrated in Silicon Valley, which becomes its own economy running at a different speed than the rest of the world and leaving it behind.

All of these outcomes would be great for economic growth, but not so great for the labour market or those who are left behind.

Second, some people say that human jobs will move to the physical world, which avoids the whole category of cognitive labour where AI is progressing so rapidly.

I am not sure how safe this is, either.

A lot of physical labour is already being done by machines, for example, manufacturing, or will soon be done by machines, for example, driving.

Also, sufficiently powerful AI will be able to accelerate the development of robots and then control those robots in the physical world.

It may buy some time, which is a good thing, but I'm worried it won't buy much.

And even if the disruption was limited only to cognitive tasks, it would still be an unprecedentedly large and rapid disruption.

Third, perhaps some tasks inherently require or greatly benefit from a human touch.

I'm a little more uncertain about this one, but I'm still skeptical that it will be enough to offset the bulk of the impacts I described above.

AI is already widely used for customer service.

Many people report that it is easier to talk to AI about their personal problems than to talk to a therapist, that the AI is more patient.

When my sister was struggling with medical problems during a pregnancy, she felt she wasn't getting the answers or support she needed from her care providers, and she found Claude to have a better bedside manner, as well as succeeding better at diagnosing the problem.

I'm sure there are some tasks for which a human touch really is important, but I'm not sure how many, and here we're talking about finding work for nearly everyone in the labor market.