White House AI czar David Sacks dismissed concerns about artificial intelligence taking away jobs on Tuesday, just days after a major AI leader warned the technology could lead unemployment to climb as high as 20% in the next few years.
“Personally, I don’t think it’s (AI) going to lead to a giant wave of unemployment,” Sacks told attendees at the Amazon Web Services summit in Washington, DC. “I think it’s actually very hard to replace a human job entirely. I think it’s easier to replace pieces of it.”
“I don’t think we’re going to have 20% unemployment,” he added.
The comments come after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios that artificial intelligence could wipe out as much as half of entry-level, white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper last month, Amodei said he feared people won’t adapt quickly enough to the speed of AI’s innovations.
“I really worry, particularly at the entry level, that the AI models are very much at the center of what an entry level human-worker would do,” he cautioned. “I think we do need to be raising the alarm. I think we do need to be concerned about it. I think policymakers do need to worry about it.”
“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Amodei continued.
Experts predict at least some economic upheaval due to the swift adoption of new technology, but opinions vary widely on how, when or even to what extent that will happen in the world’s largest economy.
Sacks singled out what he called a “doomer cult,” which supports what he believes is restrictive AI regulation, underestimates the capacity for AI-driven economic growth and overestimates potential job losses.
“I could see AI driving our growth rate to something like 4 or 5%” he said. “I think you’re already seeing the beginning of an AI boom. I mean, I’m very optimistic that this will be a huge economic tailwind for us.”
Still, Sacks acknowledged that AI will inflict some pain for people whose opportunities may be upended by the new technology.
“There will be some retraining that is required for students and workers, and I don’t want to minimize that,” Sacks continued. “So there will be challenges too, but I think it’s going to be a really bright future.”
A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that nearly two in three US adults believe that AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next two decades. More than half of all Americans say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about job losses due to AI.
But it nevertheless remains a national security priority, Sacks said. He told attendees that he believed China is only three to six months behind the United States in AI. “China is not years behind us in AI,” he said. “It’s a very close race.”
Sacks’ comments come as President Donald Trump is trying to pass his sweeping domestic policy and tax cut bill, which includes a 10-year moratorium on enforcement of state AI regulations, including laws aimed at preventing hiring discrimination or non-consensual, explicit deepfakes.
Academics, tech workers and advocacy groups have warned the provision could shield AI companies from potential harms they inflict on society.
Anthropic’s Amodei told CNN he sees huge potential in AI, which he believes could cure cancer. But he also fretted about what that advancement could cost in jobs.
“I really worry, particularly at the entry level, that the AI models are, you know, very much at the center of what an entry level human worker would do,” he said.
But Sacks said AI is coming, and it’s best to be prepared rather than try to stop it. It will proliferate throughout the economy as chips powering AI grow more powerful and enable significantly more intelligent models.
“I don’t think that the right thing to do here is to throw up a wall and just be so afraid of AI that we try to resist it,” he said. “It’s kind of like telling the tides to stop. It’s just not going to happen.”
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