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The rise and rapid adoption of advanced AI tools has led to widespread concerns about mass job displacement and other economic disruptions. Now, one of the industry's biggest players is looking ahead, hoping to understand what steps can be taken in the present to brace the world for the future.
AI start-up Anthropic announced Friday that it was launching its Economic Futures Program, a research initiative devoted to studying and preparing for AI's near-term economic impacts. The announcement follows a dire warning from the company's CEO, Dario Amodei, that the technology could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs within the next five years.
Also: AI agents will threaten humans to achieve their goals, Anthropic report finds
Fears versus reality
A fervor of corporate excitement around generative AI has led to a wide-scale prioritization of speed over safety, according to many industry experts. It was precisely such concerns that caused Amodei, along with his sister Daniela, to leave their positions at OpenAI in 2020 to found Anthropic, which they positioned as a beacon of safe and responsible AI development. (Many others have since left OpenAI to join Anthropic.)
There've also been much-publicized fears of an impending AI "job apocalypse" -- the wide-scale layoffs and hiring freezes as employers embrace new AI tools, such as agents, which can autonomously take action and use digital tools in order to complete goals.
The worst of those fears has not (yet) materialized. Early data indicates, however, that tech firms of all sizes are hiring fewer recent college graduates for entry-level roles, as many routine tasks are being handed over to AI systems.
The rise of agents has also caused some AI safety experts to worry. Recent research from Anthropic, in fact, found that many industry-leading models will deceive and threaten their human users if the AI's objectives are compromised.
What will the new initiative focus on?
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