Speaker 1: All Zone media. Hell, and welcome to this week's Better
Speaker 1: Offline Monologue. You best bet I'm your host ed ziit
Speaker 1: trum what Now? This week, you've probably heard some scary
Speaker 1: numbers that fifty percent of all white collar jobs will
Speaker 1: be replaced in the next one to five years. And
Speaker 1: it's come directly from despicable Carnival Barker Dario ama Day.
Speaker 1: I like calling him Warrio. It's funny. He's the CEO
Speaker 1: of Anthropic and he repeated this egregious lie to both
Speaker 1: Axios and CNN, leading to the most of the rest
Speaker 1: of the media just quoting it advobating without thinking. Now,
Speaker 1: to be specific, he said that AI would wipe out
Speaker 1: half of all entry level white collar jobs and spike
Speaker 1: unemployment to ten to twenty percent in the next one
Speaker 1: to five years. It's always this fucking he always says like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's that one year, all that five years. I don't know, mate,
Speaker 1: how werem I meant to know? I'm just making shit up.
Speaker 1: And this is the entire quote, by the way, the
Speaker 1: fundament of at least different news stories and an egregious
Speaker 1: line of shit. Now, to quote the excellent Allison Morrow
Speaker 1: of CNN, Amiday didn't cite any research or evidence to
Speaker 1: that fifty percent estimate, and she added that Ammaday is
Speaker 1: a salesman and it's in his interest to make his
Speaker 1: product appear to be inevitable and so powerful it's scary,
Speaker 1: and that little of what Ammaday told Axios was new,
Speaker 1: but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to
Speaker 1: draw attention to anthropics work. I've said it once and
Speaker 1: I'll say it again. Alison Morrow may be one of
Speaker 1: the best living business reporters. Everyone should be taking notes
Speaker 1: from her. She is the best. She was on the
Speaker 1: price Gouging, she's been on AI. She's really incredible. I'm
Speaker 1: saying this because Allison's been on the show and she rocks.
Speaker 1: She'll be back, and also because I'm pretty critical of
Speaker 1: the media and I need to give credit where it's
Speaker 1: due now. In the same week, Oxford Economics put out
Speaker 1: a report about how entry level workers were facing a
Speaker 1: job crisis and vaguely mentioned in the preview of the
Speaker 1: report that there are signs that entry level positions are
Speaker 1: being displaced by artificial intelligence and higher rates, causing Axios
Speaker 1: to run an article claiming that they're was now hard
Speaker 1: evidence that AI was driving job loss. I should also
Speaker 1: add Kevin Rouse, you know, the marketing intern that also
Speaker 1: runs a New York Times column. He just quoted that
Speaker 1: adverbatum like that. That's the exact quote he used in
Speaker 1: a story in the New York Times. Didn't even bother
Speaker 1: opening the fucking thing. Now. One might think, anyway that
Speaker 1: the report would have like, I don't know hard evidence
Speaker 1: based on what Axio said, and you'd be wrong. On
Speaker 1: the very first page, it says that there are signs
Speaker 1: that entry level positions are being displaced by official intelligence
Speaker 1: at higher rates. On page three, it claims that the
Speaker 1: higher adoption rates by information companies, along with the sheer
Speaker 1: employment declines in some roles since twenty twenty two, suggested
Speaker 1: some displacement effect from AI, and digging deeper, the largest
Speaker 1: displacement seems to be entry level jobs normally filled by
Speaker 1: recent graduates, and that is the whole argument that some
Speaker 1: roles that could maybe be automated with generative AI have
Speaker 1: seen declines and employment and so called information companies have
Speaker 1: been adopting AA at supposed and undisclosed rates, meaning that
Speaker 1: AI has taken these jobs. Did these companies actually replace
Speaker 1: workers with AI who knows no need to bother checking
Speaker 1: that or whether one can actually replace any of these
Speaker 1: roles with AI. Boast the report done, sold, go home,
Speaker 1: smoke a cigarette. You did it, Champ, You put out
Speaker 1: your fucking report, even if the report's bullshit. Actually the
Speaker 1: rest of the report's pretty good. It's just this weird bit.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure they just did four pr They knew
Speaker 1: that people would just go, oh my god, nurs Oh
Speaker 1: my goodness. AI is taking the jobs. I must cover that,
Speaker 1: except the people doing it on old people. They're people.
Speaker 1: I'm thirty nine years old, they're my age, maybe a
Speaker 1: little older, maybe a little younger. It's fucking terrifying. And like,
Speaker 1: while are absolutely some jobs being taken by AI, there
Speaker 1: is to this point little or no research that suggested
Speaker 1: that it's happening at scale. And I must be clear
Speaker 1: that I don't want this to happen. I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: tell the fucking truth. The easiest way to prove me wrong,
Speaker 1: by the way, would be to find an actual company
Speaker 1: that's done it. Show me a company that has actually
Speaker 1: replaced full employees with generative AI. Show me the job
Speaker 1: that the AI is doing and how it is doing it,
Speaker 1: and then the output that it creates do not bring
Speaker 1: me a goddamn call center. I swear to Christ They've
Speaker 1: been trying to automate those since they invented them. They've
Speaker 1: already been doing automation before large language models. If anyone
Speaker 1: actually looked into anything in technology, they would know the
Speaker 1: companies have been doing this already. It makes me feel insane,
Speaker 1: and you can't show me this because it isn't fucking happening,
Speaker 1: and I'm sick of people pretending it is. These articles
Speaker 1: do not serve the public. They do not inform the public.
Speaker 1: They are propaganda for companies like open Ai, Anthropic, and
Speaker 1: Microsoft to pretend that their software does more than it
Speaker 1: can now or ever will, so that they can continue
Speaker 1: raising billions of dollars or raising their market caps. The
Speaker 1: media refuses to dig too deep because doing so would
Speaker 1: move against the will of the markets and their editors,
Speaker 1: or worse still, they just don't care enough to check
Speaker 1: whether what they're saying is true. It's the same insincere,
Speaker 1: craven bullshit we saw with the metaverse, with Crypto, with
Speaker 1: the return to office Demands of twenty one and twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, with Quiet Quitting with companies price gouging and
Speaker 1: blaming it on inflation. Reporters are far too willing to
Speaker 1: follow exactly what they think the world wants to read,
Speaker 1: rather than actually sharing the truth or learning anything themselves.
Speaker 1: And my next episode is going to be a three
Speaker 1: parter about why I think this keeps happening. Our economy
Speaker 1: is dominated by people that are fully disconnected from the
Speaker 1: world around them, that buy things and sell things for
Speaker 1: other people that are disconnected to I call them business idiots,
Speaker 1: and they're everywhere, and I can't wait to tell you
Speaker 1: all about the next week. They turn my bloody stomach,
Speaker 1: but I love you listeners, and you're gonna love this