Elon Musk recently said that saving for retirement could become “irrelevant” in the next decade, as new technologies promise to create such an abundance of resources that nobody will need a nest egg.
Dario Amodei warned this week that achieving a plentiful future won’t be easy. The CEO of Anthropic, the AI startup behind ChatGPT-rival Claude, wrote in an essay that AI promises to “raise the quality of life for everyone” — but there will be a brutal “rite of passage” to get there.
Amodei said that at the current rate of progress, “it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.”
Replacing human labor with AI could supercharge economic growth and productivity, but the “short-term shock will be unprecedented in size,” he wrote.
Amodei said he was worried that workers displaced by AI “could form an unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass,'” and a tiny minority could capture most of the financial gains from AI, creating a “level of wealth concentration that will break society.”
He described those potential impacts on labor and equality as “grave problems” that AI companies, employers, philanthropists, and governments would have to work together to solve.
Amodei noted that he and Anthropic’s other cofounders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth to good causes, and the company will match individual donations from its staff worth billions of dollars at its current valuation.
Building a better future
Anthropic’s boss shared a similar vision to Musk in a 2024 essay. He wrote that AI will eventually become “so broadly effective and so cheap” that the current economic system will “no longer make sense.”
It could be replaced by a “large universal basic income for everyone,” or a “capitalist economy of AI systems” that distributes “huge amounts” of resources to people as the “overall economic pie will be gigantic,” he added.
But he also flagged the risk of “exploitative or dystopian directions” and said, “We will likely have to fight to get a good outcome here.”
Business Insider recently spoke to seven AI and personal finance gurus about Musk’s vision, and they shared several of Amodei’s concerns.
They urged Americans to keep saving for retirement just in case Musk is wrong — and said that even if he’s right, making sure everyone reaps the rewards of AI will require immense planning and coordination.
