Dario Amodei

Fourth, some may argue that comparative advantage will still protect humans.

Under the law of comparative advantage, even if AI is better than humans at everything, any relative differences between the human and AI profile of skills creates a basis of trade and specialization between humans and AI.

The problem is that if AIs are literally thousands of times more productive than humans, this logic starts to break down.

Even tiny transaction costs could make it not worth it for AI to trade with humans.

And human wages may be very low, even if they technically have something to offer.

It's possible all of these factors can be addressed, that the labor market is resilient enough to adapt to even such an enormous disruption.

But even if it can eventually adapt, the factors above suggest that the short-term shock will be unprecedented in size.

Subheading.

I have several suggestions, some of which Anthropic is already doing.

The first thing is simply to get accurate data about what is happening with job displacement in real time.

When an economic change happens very quickly, it's hard to get reliable data about what is happening, and without reliable data it is hard to design effective policies.

For example, government data is currently lacking granular, high-frequency data on AI adoption across firms and industries.

For the last year Anthropic has been operating and publicly releasing an economic index that shows use of our models almost in real time, broken down by industry, task, location, and even things like whether a task was being automated or conducted collaboratively.

We also have an Economic Advisory Council to help us interpret this data and see what is coming.

Second, AI companies have a choice in how they work with enterprises.

The very inefficiency of traditional enterprises means that their rollout of AI can be very path-dependent, and there is some room to choose a better path.

Enterprises often have a choice between cost savings, doing the same thing with fewer people, and innovation, doing more with the same number of people.

The market will inevitably produce both eventually, and any competitive AI company will have to serve some of both, but there may be some room to steer companies towards innovation when possible, and it may buy us some time.

Anthropic is actively thinking about this.

Third, companies should think about how to take care of their employees.