But what Anthropic have been warning in terms of the impact of AI on business and the workplace is that up to half of entry-level jobs could go within a matter of a few years. Why would we be developing a technology that is going to remove opportunity for everybody coming out of university?
We are building a technology that may have the properties of something that kickstarts a process 10 times larger than the industrial revolution that occurs in 10 times less time. And if you think about the industrial revolution, you went on a generational basis. Huge swaths of jobs were lost and huge swaths of jobs were created. But the transition often occurred generationally. Your parents did one type of job, you did a different type of job, and huge amounts of economic change had happened. But it was difficult, but it was easier to manage because it took place over a longer period of time. When we talk about the potential changes for jobs that lie ahead, we're just saying to ourselves, if we truly believe in how powerful the technology will get and how powerful people across Silicon Valley think it will become, what happens to the economy? It's not clear that the economy stays the same if you've built something that can be smarter than people, as you said, run faster than people, and you can run millions of copies of it. In fact, that seems to point to something that would massively change the economy. Now, I run a team of economists. All we see right now is some slight early stage weakness in job openings for people who are young, you know, 22 to 25. But we don't see systemic large-scale unemployment yet. But we share information from our platforms because you would really want to know if you started to see that creep up.
I mean, it stands to reason that it's coming, doesn't it? And your colleague has warned, you know, I think he did say half of entry-level white collar jobs in the end.
And the way I'd represent it, you know, having known and worked with Dario for a wonderful decade, is he sees in his mind how powerful the technology will become and wants to talk about how we'll have to contend with the challenges of it. How to look at the work that I and the institute do is we try and measure exactly what we can see right now and then join those two things. So I view it as I'm building early warning systems for the potential for unemployment and I'm building a thing called the Anthropic Economic Index which publishes that data publicly to economists around the world. If we see it, they'll see it almost immediately as well, which gives us the best way of working through the problem. At the same time, vast amounts of work will look radically different and there will be entirely new types of work as well. Well, I know that this is something that, you know, technologists always say, but I've just observed this within Anthropic where there are many people here who have completely different jobs to the ones they had some years ago. We are also finding that as a company, we're hiring more and more interdisciplinary people over time. You know, people who are philosophers or political scientists or experts in aspects of policy, not because we want them to work on narrow jobs that solely use those skills, but because there's now this technology AI, which basically lets these people run experiments or do work that they never could have done before unless they had access to a 20-person engineering team. So, I'm seeing strange new things appear as well.
I mean, I can see that within AI companies like yours, but I'm thinking about services companies, accountants, lawyers, you know, media companies. It is very difficult, isn't it, to see what those people who used to do the kind of processing work that is now easily and, you know, done already by AI are going to do instead.
There will be firms will change. I mean, I think that under everything we've just talked about, you're going to expect to see firms that do more with fewer people, but there will probably be more firms as well. And one expectation is you multiply the number of what you might think of as small entrepreneurial firms because every entrepreneur can now access the equivalent of hundreds of colleagues cheaply. That's one effect that you'd see. The other effect that you might see, which I think you're pointing to, is what happens if there's a large structural change to certain types of jobs where it's hard for people to move into a different profession. It's hard for them to then get a job at the same pay and they have to take a job at worse pay and these things have huge social and economic costs. We agree. A lot of the work that we're trying to do in policy is advocate for both rethinking aspects of social safety nets, but also things like wage insurance pilots, various ways that you can change the basket of services that people are offered to help them with career transitions because we think everyone is going to go through more of that.
So you're talking about sort of state benefits and systems to try and help people retrain, which sounds very expensive.
Well, yeah, but a lot of this is under the idea that if any of these things happened which we've just talked about, it's a symptom of much larger economic changes which are happening and that should be a symptom of AI companies making a ton of money and a sensible thing to do in that environment is to tax the AI companies appropriately such that you are able to support things on the other side of the ledger. So we basically believe that if the AI companies are right about how significant the technology could become, you're going to need to re-imagine aspects of how you do taxation. You may want to do things that sound very wild today, like tax compute, which sounds a bit crazy, but we have special tax regimes for things like oil because it's a basic resource that multiplies into the rest of the economy and it has effects relating to a concentrated number of oil manufacturers and oil shippers. You may end up doing similar things with compute and it sounds wild today, but it's something you do if the economy booms because of this technology.
The thing is to, you know, to basically underpin huge numbers of jobs just in Britain would cost probably hundreds of billions of pounds, you know, in one country. I mean, AI companies, you know, I don't know how many there will be in the future, but I mean, do you think it's feasible that a few AI companies are going to make so much money that you could tax them enough to pay for all of that all around the world?
