At Vox Popoli, culture commentator Vox Day writes, “No one cried for all the blue collar workers who were outsourced. Are we supposed to weep for the white collar workers who are soon going to find themselves AI-sourced?”

What prompted his comment was an item at RT: “AI CEO issues stark warning: Up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs may be lost in the next five years, according to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.”

In a statement to Axios published on Wednesday, Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic and is a former OpenAI executive, said he hopes to jolt the US government and fellow developers into preparing for the consequences of rapid automation. AI could spike unemployment in the US to 10-20% in the next one to five years, he warned. May 29, 2025

But wait.

The blue collar jobs in the United States were outsourced to countries where the workers are paid less and have fewer rights. That is not at all the same thing as jobs getting automated out of existence.

And it’s far from clear that white collar jobs will be automated out of existence either. Bear in mind something that technology consultant Jeffrey Funk wrote here on Monday:

The Wall Street Journal has been documenting the mixed impact of AI on jobs and productivity for years. Just in the last month, it described three largely superficial AI projects by Johnson & Johnson, which it characterized as the best 10% of its AI experimentation in a so-called “thousand flowers” approach. Similarly, paraphrasing IBM’s CEO, “the tech giant has used artificial intelligence, and specifically AI agents, to replace the work of a couple hundred human resources workers.” As a result, it has hired more programmers and salespeople.” In a third article, WSJ then summed up AI’s impact on business productivity in a headline: “Companies are Struggling to Drive a Return on AI,” in which many of the experts are recommending a task-based approach to AI (more on this later).

More detailed experiments also reach similarly nuanced conclusions, such as this one from AMD, one of the largest designers of chips, and of the software that links their hardware with operating systems.

“AI’s contradictory impact on productivity: Squeezing a balloon ”

Some of us look forward to a measured analysis of why hype triumphs so easily over observation in these matters.

Hat tip: Ken Francis