Does 50% GDP growth sound out of this world? Not necessarily, if you’re one of the AI masters of the universe.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Silicon Valley’s elite could see eye-popping GDP growth while the rest of society reels from massive unemployment if regulators don’t step in.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he laid out a grim scenario in which Silicon Valley generates so much wealth from the artificial-intelligence boom that it becomes “decoupled” from the rest of society.
“The nightmare would be that there’s this emerging ‘zeroth world’ country that’s like 7 million people in Silicon Valley and 3 million people scattered throughout that is forming its own economy and becoming decoupled or disconnected,” Amodei told The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief Emma Tucker.
AI could power baseline GDP growth in the 5-10% range — with Silicon Valley AI maestros seeing growth of up to 50% — while unemployment would spike to a jaw-dropping 10%, he predicted.
“This technology is so crazy it can pull things apart that way,” Amodei said. “I think that would be a really bad world, I would almost say that would be a dystopian world. We should think about how to stop that.”
The Anthropic boss expects helpful software to become drastically cheaper or even potentially free as AI models improve. In terms of the job market, he said there are “probably going to be more jobs in the physical world and less jobs in the knowledge work economy.”
Amodei called for some form of regulation to protect society from the upcoming economic upheaval, noting there’s “gonna need to be some role for government in the displacement that’s this macroeconomically large.”
“I don’t think there’s an awareness at all of what is coming here and the magnitude of it,” the exec said.
Amodei, who cofounded Anthropic after leaving OpenAI over concerns that it wasn’t prioritizing safety in AI development, has gained a reputation for speaking frankly about the technology’s risks.
He warned last May that politicians and executives should stop “sugarcoating” the potential for mass layoffs as a result of AI. At the time, he said unemployment could surge as high as 20% in the future, with white-collar gigs in tech, finance and law hit particularly hard.
The Anthropic boss also caused a stir in Davos this week after declaring that Nvidia and other chipmakers shouldn’t sell their hardware to China, calling it a “bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
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