Artificial intelligence is moving fast, and according to researchers from Anthropic, an AI startup backed by Amazon AMZN founder Jeff Bezos, it's about to upend white collar work around the world.
In a recent discussion on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, Anthropic researchers Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken explored what they see as an almost inevitable future: widespread automation of desk jobs.
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Prepare For A World Where AI Replaces Office Work
Douglas said the transition may happen sooner than many expect. “There is this whole spectrum of crazy futures. But the one that I feel we’re almost guaranteed to get—this is a strong statement to make—is one where, at the very least, you get a drop in white collar workers at some point in the next five years,” he said. “I think it’s very likely in two, but it seems almost overdetermined in five.”
Bricken agreed, saying, “We should expect to see them automated within the next five years.” That kind of shift, Douglas added, “completely changes the world over the next decade.”
Even if progress in training algorithms slows down, the models that already exist are good enough to perform many white collar tasks, especially if they’re fed the right data. “Even if algorithmic progress stalls out, and we just never figure out how to keep progress going… the current suite of algorithms are sufficient to automate white collar work, provided you have enough of the right kinds of data,” Douglas said.
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They argued that it’s financially justifiable to automate office tasks, even if it means you need to “hand spoon” every single task to the model. The economic impact of automating or drastically reducing white collar jobs, they said, could be massive. And countries that don't prepare could be left behind.
Nations Need To Start Planning Now
Douglas summed it up this way: “Plan for the case where white collar work is automatable. And then consider, what does that mean for your economy? What should you be doing to prepare policy?”
Douglas warned that countries without highly advanced, large-scale AI models, also called “frontier models”—such as India, Nigeria or Australia—will have tough decisions to make. He advised governments to start investing in compute infrastructure, AI companies, and the broader tech ecosystem. “Compute becomes the most valuable resource in the world,” he said. “The GDP of your economy is dramatically affected by how much compute you can deploy.”
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Automation May Hit Desk Jobs First, Not Physical Labor
While robots still struggle with physical tasks like opening doors, AI is already capable of coding and performing many computer-based jobs. That could result in a strange future where machines do the thinking and humans handle the physical labor.
“The really scary future is one in which AIs can do everything except for the physical robotic tasks,” Bricken said. “In which case, you’ll have humans with AirPods, and glasses and there’ll be some robot overlord controlling the human through cameras by just telling it what to do.”
Douglas pointed out that this transitional phase could be a “pretty terrible decade.” If jobs are lost but scientific breakthroughs and robotic deployment lag behind, then improvements in daily life may stall. He said the result could be a period where people's main value is their ability to do physical tasks that AI cannot yet handle. People’s main comparative advantage in that case would be as “fantastic robots.” “That's a shocking, shocking world,” he said.
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