Remember the AI job apocalypse

Remember the AI job apocalypse where every AI boss basically spent a year saying AI would take your job and like entirely replace humans? Well this month they all changed their minds at the same time. And if the billionaires all doing about face like robots, something's a little weird. For a solid year the most powerful people in AI all told you the same thing. Your job is going away, you are going to be redundant, you will be relegated to the permanent underclass. There will be two remaining jobs which will be AI slop influencer and AI data centre water attendant. They said half of all entry level office jobs will be gone. But then over the last few weeks, all of them at the same time basically changed their tune. Now it's actually humans are irreplaceable. We were too pessimistic. Don't worry beloved humans. Usually when everyone in the industry just one 80s on the opinions they've been writing blogs and tweets about for years at the same time. There is a reason rewind not so far back to the near past to the warnings. Because they were big flashing signs and didn't seem like they came with the return policy. Dario Amodae who is the CEO of Anthropic, he said last year that AI could wipe out about half of all entry level white collar jobs. Push unemployment to 20%. This was a big idea that cast a great shadow on the industry. The AI overlords almost seem to be gleeful about the idea they were changing the world to this extent, even though the message was that ordinary people were going to lose their jobs on mass law, banking, consulting, coding, we're all apparently gonna be gone. Sam Altman of Open AI spent two years saying AI would cause seismic shifts in the workforce. The CEO of Ford said that AI would replace quote, literally half of all white collar workers in the United States. And I guess he meant literally like figuratively in retrospect. This was the message from the top of the industry for a year straight. The machines are coming for your day job. Now flash forward to the same people this summer. Sam Altman said, I am delighted to be wrong about this. He now says the industry underestimated how much we're going to keep people at the centre of everything. So much changes in the span of a few months when you are going public. Amade stopped calling AI an agent of job destruction and started calling it a multiplier of output. Ford, which is the company that would apparently erase half of white collar work, literally just hired several hundred engineers back because what they automated wasn't apparently good enough. Every doomsayer is backtracking at roughly the same moment. Call it a coincidence. A survey backs it up. The sheriff CEOs who expected AI to seriously cut head count dropped from 46% at the start of last year to just 20% this spring. So it's not just the upper upper crust of the AI ruling class. So the question is not were they wrong then, are they right now? It's why did every single one of them change the story at the exact same time? And there are a few factors in play here. So the first is that the data hasn't actually backed up the very scary version of the AI wipes at all your jobs story. At least not yet. A study out of Yale found really no meaningful change in unemployment for the jobs most exposed to AI since Track GBT came out. As an MIT economist put it, you may have simply realised that it was bad business to say that your great new product will destroy the economy. The second factor is a big one, which is that the timing lines up near perfectly with the big money opening eye and Anthropic are both chasing near trillion dollar IPOs. When you're about to sell stock to the public and court massive investment. Saying our product is a job's apocalypse is a regulatory nightmare. Maybe a lawsuit, definitely a PR headache waiting to happen. Our product makes everyone much more productive and keeps humans at the center. That's a much nicer thing to put in front of the people who are writing your checks. Especially as a retail investor. I don't really think I'm throwing my Robin Hood money into a company that is going to end my livelihood. And then finally, maybe this one's a scratch, but it's that the fear mongering story had already done its job. If you're spending nearly $1 trillion building data centers, you need a world changing story that's big enough to match the price tag. Saying this will transform the entire economy. Is that the fear played a role in pulling in the investment. Once the money is committed, you don't really need the scary version quite as much. In fact, it starts working against you. So the reason why you shouldn't fully relax. However, sorry that the new story doesn't exactly match what's happening. Tech layoffs this year have already passed 115,000, which is nearly matching all of last year. Meta, Amazon, SNAP have all directly named AI as a reason for cuts, so CEOs softened up their language. But the layoffs aren't stopping. So here's really where it lands. The same people who spent a year scaring you about taking your job just spent a month telling you not to worry. They got warm and fuzzy, like, right as they started asking the public for a trillion dollars. These guys forecast the future of work the way a weatherman would forecast a storm if he's also selling umbrellas on the side. They are rather biased in their predictions here. Where this shakes out is really to be determined. In the meantime, I don't see AI telling you the news from bed, so Mark safe.