“Humans no longer are—or soon will no longer be—the most intelligent beings on the planet,” said Noah Smith in The Free Press. Artificial intelligence has advanced so rapidly over the past year that it’s surpassing human intelligence in performing nearly every task. That’s the thesis of a recent viral essay published by Matt Shumer, CEO of AI company OthersideAI. Shumer said the latest AI versions from Claude and ChatGPT—available only through paid subscriptions—are such a major leap that he can give them a complex assignment like creating an app, and voilà! Far faster than any human, the AI will write all the code, create the app, test it, and refine it. Shumer warns that AI may replace half of all white-collar jobs within five years. Critics call Shumer an alarmist, but I suspect he “understates the pace and magnitude of the changes taking place.” Like Native Americans who saw sailing ships disgorging European settlers on their shores, we’re coming face-to-face with “forces greater and more powerful” than ourselves. We may soon lose control of our destiny—“forever.”
AI will certainly be very disruptive to jobs, said James Pethokoukis in Vox. But energy capacity and decisions about AI regulation, development, and adoption will “move at ordinary speeds.” About 80% of U.S. businesses do not currently use AI, and they won’t shift to heavy reliance overnight. Over time, the economy will adapt and shift jobs toward hands-on, human work AI can’t do well, such as health care, education, and creative work. Some “urgency may be warranted,” but Shumer’s “AI apocalypse warning” of a rapid job wipeout is overly pessimistic.
Still, what “if the doomers are right?” asked Philip Klein in National Review. If AI advances so quickly that millions of highly educated, well-paid white-collar workers become not only unemployed but unemployable, “it will be more destabilizing to our politics than anything we have previously experienced.” In the worst-case scenario, “elite anger” could fuse with populism and spark “revolutionary fervor that sweeps through the nation and topples the republic.” Remember, though: “We get to decide how technology is used,” said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. Before it’s too late, we must “create rules that govern how industries may use AI,” just as we regulate so many other endeavors. We don’t “have to walk into a dystopian future just because OpenAI builds it.”
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