A year after Dario Amodei warned that rapid advances in artificial intelligence could trigger a serious employment crisis, the CEO has a more foreboding forecast — this time for the larger software industry.
In with The Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker, Amodei said that software is going to become cheap in the future, “maybe essentially free.”
As AI tools become more and more capable of writing code, Amodei suggested that there is going to be a fundamental shift in how software is built and paid for.
Economics of Software
“The premise that you need to amortize a piece of software you build across millions of users, that may start to be false,” he said in the interview.
In other words, this means the upfront cost of creating software is plummeting so fast that one no longer need millions of users to justify building it.
Thanks to AI, the time and financial cost required to build a functional piece of software is shrinking from months and millions of dollars to hours and pennies.
“There are whole jobs, whole careers that we’ve built for decades that may not be present,” Amoidei told Tucker.
He said he believes that the society can adjust to these shifting trends but there is not much awareness about the magnitude and pace of the shift.
Serious employment crisis
A year ago to Fox News, the Anthropic CEO had cautioned that the pace at which AI is advancing could lead to a serious employment crisis, especially for entry-level white collar work.
Since then, the world has seen thousands of job cuts, particularly in the tech sector and including Big Tech firms like Meta, linked to AI-driven productivity.
At that time, Amodei said the technology has advanced dramatically in just two years. “Two years ago, it was at the level of a smart high school student; now it’s probably at the level of a smart college student and reaching beyond that,” he had said during the interview.
He had pointed out that AI could disrupt employment in sectors heavily dependent on analytical and administrative work.
“Things like summarizing a document, brainstorming, putting together a financial report, makes me worry a lot that entry-level jobs in areas like finance, consulting, tech, many, many other areas like that, entry-level white-collar work.
“I worry that those things are going to be first augmented, but before long replaced by AI systems. It’s hard to predict the future, but we may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hand,” Amodei had asserted.
He argued that though the growth of AI cannot realistically be halted, governments and companies still have an opportunity to shape how AI affects workers and economies.
Amodei said worker adaptation and public policy would both play crucial roles. In one of his most striking remarks, Amodei had suggested that taxation of AI firms, including his own, could eventually become necessary.