Gary Marcus endorsed the essay's tempered near-term workforce predictions.
Current US data shows unemployment holding at 4.2 percent with prime-age employment near highs and job openings outnumbering job seekers, while Claude conversation logs reveal AI handling slices of work but hitting persistent bottlenecks that limit both productivity jumps and headcount cuts.
Gary Marcus and DeepMind's Alex Olegimas publicly endorsed the analysis for avoiding both hype and panic, though the essay leaves open how quickly weak links might shrink once models improve beyond the one-year horizon McCrory sketches.
Positive users welcomed Anthropic's call for caution on AI job disruption forecasts because current data shows limited impacts so far, while negative users pointed to recent layoffs for AI spending and accused CEOs of misleading claims.
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Thoughtful essay on employment from @Anthropic’s @PeterMcCrory, endorsed by Google DeepMind’s @alexolegimas. I tend also agree with most of it, which is why I have consistently suggested that a jobapocalypse is NOT imminent.
Very thoughtful essay from Peter. I agree with all of this, including the caution in predicting future disruption from the (lack of) current disruption.
Good post with sensible takes from Anthropic on econ impacts!
But many AI lab comms, research, or policy staff could do better at internalising this: Peter's piece seems in contradiction with a general "RSI leads to a winner take all economy or a sharp change in unemployment/growth" take, which is usually not thought through IMO.
Good post with sensible takes from Anthropic on econ impacts!
@GaryMarcus @Anthropic @PeterMcCrory @alexolegimas What about the half-million of us laid off since Jan 2025 so that our companies could afford the CapEx to convince Wall Street that they were properly investing in AI?
This is absolutely excellent and gets at something that I find increasingly annoying. There are just many bottlenecks besides intelligence and they won't magically be solved by AGI. Even if you think that AGI will be able to deal with legal and political obstacles easily and quickly, a view I find hopelessly naive, even more fundamentally there are physical constraints that won't be abolished by AGI or even ASI, although it will allow us to work around them much more effectively. Concretely, even if after we have AGI, a lot of atoms will have to be moved and this won't happen overnight. For instance, even if you have a developed a new technology to produce electricity more cheaply, you still have to actually build the power plants that use this technology. Do you think AGI will develop versatile robots that can replace humans and build such infrastructure much faster and more cheaply than we currently can. Great, except that we'll still have to actually build those robots, which means building factories without their help. And even for AGI to develop those robots, it will need data that doesn't exist yet and will have to be collected, which will take time because even if I'm sure that AGI will also help with that it won't eliminate all bottlenecks and the ways it will come up with to help will also require moving atoms around, which takes time. Again, this is true even if you assume away legal and political obstacles, but of course they will exist and be massive. Saying that doesn't make me an "AI skeptic", I'm actually quite bullish about AI. I have no doubt that AGI will eventually happen, though I suspect that most people in the AI industry overestimate how quickly it will happen (but that's a view I hold with relatively low confidence because I don't think anybody knows), and I'm certain that even short of AGI, AI has the potential to profoundly transform human civilization. I even think we should take seriously the possibility that it might end it, so I'm hardly a "AI skeptic" in any meaningful sense, but I'm increasingly annoyed by how sloppy and intellectually lazy many AGI-pilled people are. They constantly make very strong and highly non-obvious claims, such as the claim that the "AI race" has a winner-take-all dynamic, without a clear and rigorous arguments for them and dismiss anyone who asks them to produce such an argument as an unenlightened soul who hasn't seen the light yet. As Ruxandra notes, they clearly think that if you disagree with them it's because unlike them you aren't privy to the secrets of the gods, but no actually that's just because they haven't thought things through. If they had, they wouldn't think that things which are most definitely not obvious, such as the idea that the "AI race" is a winner-take-all kind of things, are obvious. To be clear, I'm not saying that it's not a winner-take-all kind of things, only that it's not obvious that it is and that if you think it's obvious this only demonstrates that you have not thought things through. That's one example but there are many others, such as the claim that restricting access to Chinese open weights models is obviously justified because they will make companies like OpenAI and Anthropic unprofitable, which doesn't actually follow even if you accept that already non-obvious premise. One reason this intellectual laziness and sloppiness annoys me is precisely because I'm not an "AI skeptic", but actually think AI may be the greatest thing that ever happened and I fear that it will take longer for us to reap the benefits it will bring because we don't think about it carefully enough and end up adopting bad policies or unnecessarily increasing opposition to AI as a result.
@GaryMarcus @Anthropic @PeterMcCrory @alexolegimas makes sense to stay calm and watch the data
@GaryMarcus @Anthropic @PeterMcCrory @alexolegimas Agreed the current lack of disruption is a pretty solid signal that a sudden jobapocalypse isnt around the corner
Cool, and I get that Dario and others have come out and said maybe job impacts are not as severe or as immediate. But do they get that the AI CEOs flash banged corporate America so hard that the after image of "cut jobs, AI can do all of this cheaper" is all they can see now? The tech companies can pivot in their messaging, but c-suite executives perceive shifts away from that narrative as projecting weakness or their own ignorance - that they were had by the sales pitch, and did what they do best, rush to make an uninformed decision to impact bottom line or not be perceived as being left behind by the FOMOnomists. I will never forgive the AI companies for the damage they've done.
@GaryMarcus @Anthropic @PeterMcCrory @alexolegimas What about this?
@GaryMarcus @Anthropic @PeterMcCrory @alexolegimas so the real takeaway is that current disruption data doesn’t back the panic makes sense to watch what’s actually happening instead of what might happen
@GaryMarcus @Anthropic @PeterMcCrory @alexolegimas feels like the right direction the essay on employment captures the nuance well and the agreement from big names adds credibility
@TheMachineSpace @GaryMarcus @Anthropic @PeterMcCrory @alexolegimas Shhhh you are going to hurt feelings spilling the ground truth like that.
See also: Ruxandra and Philippe's posts on this below