Instead of putting people out of work, AI is mostly helping them do their jobs, finds a new study from Anthropic, the maker of Claude, an AI model popular among software coders.
Why it matters: The findings land amid a heated debate over whether AI will ultimately eliminate jobs or create new ones.
The big picture: The report offers a detailed examination of AI use, looking at an anonymized sample from 2 million real Claude conversations that took place last year on its free and pay-for services.
- This is the fourth time Anthropic has released its economic index, focused on understanding AI's role in the job market and economy.
Between the lines: Anthropic's own founder and CEO has warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment as high as 10–20% within one to five years.
- But the study out today, from his own company, paints a more nuanced picture. And many other researchers find that, like with past technological revolutions, AI is more likely to create jobs than destroy them.
- "The future is uncertain," says Peter McCrory, Anthropic's head of economics.
Zoom in: AI is reshaping how people work, not if people work.
- Put another way: AI takes over parts of people's jobs.
- 49% of jobs can now use AI in at least a quarter of the tasks involved — up from 36% three months ago, Anthropic found.
How it works: Researchers used Claude to analyze transcripts of conversations along different dimensions — was it about work or for educational or personal purposes?
- How long would it take to complete a task if they didn't have AI? How many years of education would someone need to understand Claude's response?
- They considered whether people were using Claude to fully automate a task for them — "translate this into French." Or were they augmenting their work — "let's write this report together."
By the numbers: The study found about a 50/50 split between augmentation and automation, with a slight edge to augmentation.
- 53% of work, on the free Claude site, involved augmented tasks. That share is down slightly from January of last year when it was 57%.
Zoom out: The way AI changes your job depends a lot on what kind of work you do, and broadly speaking the differences can be grouped into two buckets.
- Deskilling: AI starts to take on large portions of the roles — say for data entry workers or IT specialists. This work appears to be more at risk for being automated away — continuing trends decades-long in the making.
- Upskilling: AI takes on some of your more rote work, leaving more time for higher-skill human tasks. As with radiologists or therapists, for example, who can devote more time to interacting with clients and less on back-end, time-intensive work.
Friction point: The study finds that AI delivers the biggest productivity gains on complex work — the same work that most requires human oversight.
- It can take Claude minutes to pull together a broad overview of research, says McCrory.
- But whether or not that actually generates any real value hinges on your expertise in evaluating that work, he says.
- "The most complex tasks that people use Claude for are the ones where Claude tends to struggle most," he says. "Human oversight, direction and iteration is thus that much more valuable."
What to watch: The need for humans is either a bottleneck that will slow down any productivity gains brought on by AI, or a force multiplier that will keep us all employed.
Reality check: The tech is improving quickly and Anthropic also has an interest in portraying its technology as revolutionary, to draw users and investors.
The bottom line: AI is changing the way we work, but the job apocalypse is not here yet.
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