The leader of a major artificial intelligence lab has cautioned that AI might cause the disappearance of 50% of entry-level office jobs within the next five years.

Following a presentation of his company’s technology at a developer event, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, mentioned to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that both politicians and businesses are unprepared for the potential increase in unemployment rates that AI might lead to.

“AI is beginning to outperform humans in nearly all cognitive tasks, and we, as a society, will collectively face this challenge,” remarked the 42-year-old during an interview with Cooper.

“AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.” 

The technology that companies like his are building, Amodei said, could boost unemployment in America as high as 20 per cent by 2030. 

Anthropic’s AI can work nearly seven hours a day, he said, and has the skills typically required of entry-level corporate workers – “the ability to summarise a document, analyse a bunch of sources and put it into a report, write computer code” – at the same standard “as a smart college student”. 

“We can see where the trend is going, and that’s what’s driving some of the concern [about AI in the workforce],” Amodei said. 

Though Amodei acknowledged it would “definitely not [be] in my economic interest” to do so, he urged US politicians to consider implementing a tax on AI labs. 

He said he was “raising the alarm” because his counterparts at other companies “haven’t as much and I think someone needs to say it and to be clear”. 

“It’s eerie the extent to which the broader public and politicians, legislators, I don’t think, are fully aware of what’s going on,” he said. 

In a separate interview with US publication Axios, Amodei said such workforce changes are “going to happen in a small amount of time – as little as a couple of years or less”. 

“Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced – and 20 percent of people don’t have jobs,” he said. 

“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.” 

In January, a World Economic Forum (WEF) survey found that 41 percent of employers intend to reduce their workforce because of AI automation by 2030. 

“Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labor) market – driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers,” the WEI said in a statement at the time. 

“The presence of both graphic designers and legal secretaries just outside the top 10 fastest-declining job roles, a first-time prediction not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate GenAI’s increasing capacity to perform knowledge work.” 

Closer to home, in December the Social Policy Group reported that without immediate intervention, one in three Australians in knowledge-based or manual roles were at risk of job loss by 2030. 

Conversely, the WEF found that close to 70 percent of companies plan to hire new workers with skills to design AI tools and enhancements, and 62 percent plan to hire more employees with skills to work alongside the technology. 

“Now, you can hire one experienced worker, equip them with AI tooling, and they can produce the output of the junior worker on top of their own – without the overhead,” recruiter at US venture capital firm SignalFire, Heather Doshay, told Business Insider. 

Doshay stressed that AI “isn’t stealing job categories outright – it’s absorbing the lowest-skill tasks”.

“That shifts the burden to universities, boot camps, and candidates to level up faster,” she added.

‘We can’t just sleepwalk into it’

Amodei insisted AI can – and will – be used for good, noting he “wouldn’t be building this technology if I didn’t think that it could make the world better”. 

“We have to make sure that people have the ability to adapt, and that we adopt the right policies,” Amodei told CNN. 

“We have to act now. We can’t just sleepwalk into it … I don’t think we can stop this bus.

“From the position that I’m in, I can maybe hope to do a little to steer the technology in a direction where we become aware of the harms, we address the harms, and we’re still able to achieve the benefits.”