Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said last week that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and cause unemployment to skyrocket to as high as 20%. He should know better—as should many other serious academics, who have been warning for years that AI will mean the end of employment as we know it. In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of Oxford University produced a research paper estimating that 47% of U.S. employment was at risk of being eliminated by new technologies. Before we resign ourselves to obsolescence at the hands of our new robot overlords, we’d do well to recognize that humans have experienced technological disruptions before, and we adapted to meet them. AI won’t be any different. In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of men and boys across America worked as pinsetters in bowling alleys. In 1946 AMF introduced an automatic pin-setting machine, and by the mid-1950s those jobs were mostly gone. Similarly, there was a time when the elevators in hotels and office buildings across the country were staffed by human operators. In the 1920s and ’30s, elevator companies began installing “robot elevators” with automatic controls, and eventually elevator operators all but disappeared. Data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey tell countless other similar stories—from the decline of agricultural field workers due to motorized tractors to the rise and fall of “motion picture projectionists,” who operated projectors in movie theaters.

Full commentary : Robotic humanoids will not take our jobs but boost productivity, lower prices and spur the evolution of the labor market.