Has the A.I. Job Apocalypse Been Postponed? | The New Yorker
Has the A.I. Job Apocalypse Been Postponed? | The New Yorker
摘要: The Financial Page
Has the A.I. Job Apocalypse Been Postponed?
So far, the proliferation of products such as Claude and ChatGPT hasn’t led to mass d
正文
The Financial Page
Has the A.I. Job Apocalypse Been Postponed?
So far, the proliferation of products such as Claude and ChatGPT hasn’t led to mass displacement of workers. But deployment is accelerating and economic pressures are rising.
John Cassidy
September 7, 2026
Source photograph by Mel Musto / Bloomberg / Getty
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The Financial Page
, John Cassidy’s weekly column on economics and politics.
Nearly three years ago, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT-4,
Sam Altman
, the company’s C.E.O., suggested that the artificial-intelligence revolution could eliminate up to half of all existing jobs. “I think that’s good,” Altman said, at a
Wall Street Journal
conference. “I think that’s the way of progress. And we’ll find new and better jobs.” In May of last year, Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of Anthropic, said that A.I. could destroy up to half of all entry-level positions and send the unemployment rate up to between ten and twenty per cent by 2030. So far, though, there’s little sign of job displacement on the scale that the two tech barons predicted. And Altman, for one, is backtracking. Speaking on a podcast last month, he admitted that the A.I. transformation was proceeding slower than he had expected, adding, “The economy just has so much inertia.”
Like everyone else, Altman can read economic statistics. The August job figures, which were released last Friday, showed that the economy created a hundred and sixty-two thousand jobs last month, more than Wall Street had expected, and that the nationwide unemployment rate stayed at 4.1 per cent—a low figure in historical terms. During the past couple of years, the rate has risen a bit, but many economists attribute this to slower economic growth and lower immigration, rather than A.I. destroying jobs. Since August, 2023, according to another government survey, layoffs and discharges have averaged about 1.7 million a month. Tha