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Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

You best bet.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Offline.

Now, this week you've probably heard some scary numbers, that 50% of all white-collar jobs will be replaced in the next one to five years, and it's come directly from despicable carnival barker Dario Amadeh.

I like calling him Wario, it's funny. He's the CEO of Anthropic, and he repeated this egregious lie to both Axios and CNN, leading to the most of the rest of

the media, just quoting it abatim without thinking. Now, to be specific, he said that AI would wipe out

half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next one to five years.

It's always this fucking, he always says like, oh, it's like

one year or like five years. I don't know, mate. How am I meant to know? I'm just making shit up.

And this is the entire quote, by the way, the fundament of at least 30 different news stories

and an egregious line of shit. Now, to quote the excellent Alison Morrow of CNN, Amadee didn't cite any research or evidence

to that 50% estimate, and she added that Amade is a salesman, and it's in his interest to make

his product appear to be inevitable and so powerful, it's scary, and that little of what

Amaday told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropics' work. I've said it once and I'll say it again. Alison Morrow may be one of the best living business reporters. Everyone should be taking notes from her. She is the best. She was on the price gouging. She's been on AI. She's really incredible. I'm saying this because Allison's been on the show and she rocks, she'll be back, and also because I'm pretty critical of the media and I need to give credit where it's due. Now, in the same week, Oxford Economics put out a report about how entry-level workers were facing a job crisis and vaguely mentioned in the preview of the report that there are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by our official intelligence and higher rates.

Causing Axios to run an article claiming that there was now hard evidence that AI was driving job

loss. I should also add Kevin Ruse, you know, the marketing intern that also runs the New York Times

column. He just quoted the adverbatim. That's the exact quote he used in a story in the New York

Times. Didn't even bother opening the fucking thing. Now, one might think anyway that the report would have, like, I don't know, hard evidence based on what Axio said, and you'd be wrong. On the very first page, it says that there are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates. On page 3, it claims that the

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