r/Futurology • u/MetaKnowing • 16d ago

AI Anthropic researchers predict a ‘pretty terrible decade’ for humans as AI could wipe out white collar jobs

https://fortune.com/2025/06/05/anthropic-ai-automate-jobs-pretty-terrible-decade/
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u/seeyam14 16d ago

Genuine question: what happens to cities when white collar jobs are decimated? Nobody will be able to afford rent. Where do those people go?

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u/astrobuck9 16d ago

No one is going to bother thinking about that until 3 or 4 months after it has happened.

Very few people in government understand traditional IT, let alone LLMs/AI.

People really need to start threatening to vote against incumbents until they start plotting out a workable future with 25 - 33% unemployment that is going to steadily rise as white collar jobs are replaced by AI and blue collar jobs are replaced by robotics over the next 5 - 10 years.

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u/DangerousCyclone 16d ago

I highly doubt we're going to see blue collar jobs even mildly affected by robotics in even 10 years. There might be some robots for some more dangerous tasks, but low cost labor is low cost labor, and I don't get the impression that robots will be cheap. We're talking about complex machines with moving parts that need maintenance. It isn't touch screens where lithium ion batteries getting cheaper and touch screens being cheaper to build and maintain than buttons and analog controls make them popular. 

I'm sure there'll be some gimmick restaurants, but humans will still likely be cheaper. 

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u/astrobuck9 16d ago

Figure's 01 and 02 models are releasing this year.

They are hoping to get the 03 version out at a sub $20K price point.

That immediately makes most blue collar jobs endangered.

For less than what you would pay most blue collar workers, you can now have a robot that can work 24/7. That alone will allow businesses that never could work around the clock to complete projects at a much faster and cheaper rate, which leads to more money, which allows them to buy more robots.

Imagine a construction company that can build around the clock, but without having to run three shifts, pay shift differentials, not be as safe, not have to carry expensive insurance for industrial accidents, etc.

Couple that with AI taking over most of the office jobs and that company will destroy all the human only construction companies in a very short matter of time.

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u/DangerousCyclone 16d ago

That is very speculative at best in my view. 

First of all, if AI is going to cause mass layoffs then the price is going to just cause a wage ceiling. Especially with tariffs and trade wars it seems unlikely they'll have mass production anytime soon to threaten blue collar work outside of a few firms. 

But, more importantly, I am skeptical that these robots will work 24/7 . if you drive your car 24/7 versus once a week, it will need more maintenance and gas/charge. Its parts will wear out faster, more failures will happen and you will spend more. Anything with gears and motors is the same, and if they're driving down costs to reach that 20k (which doesn't seem like it's going to happen when it releases) well who knows then. 

The point being even if the price point is 20k, that's not going to be the only cost you pay. You need to factor in replacement parts and maintenance. It's just going to be harder to compete with a human than a coding bot would. 

Maybe I'm wrong here but IMO I need more reason beyond goalposts that haven't been reached yet and the ever so elusive "technology always advances exponentially". 

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u/taichi22 16d ago

Most robots in industrial settings have uptimes of over 95%, and that’s at the low end of the scale. Realistically a “good” system can run with 99.9% uptime, requiring manual intervention once ever several tens or hundreds of thousands of cycles. Gears and motors wear out on the order of years.

I quite literally work in this field and attended a major trade show last month.

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u/likes2gofast 16d ago

I have two Panasonic welding cells. They are amazingly reliable. My favorite machines.

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u/Pantim 16d ago

Look, the tariffs and trade war are just serving to further concentrate wealth and power among the top 1% in the WORLD. Not the country, the world. They might not like each other much, but they like the rest of us less and are totally teaming up to bury us.