[WILL AI STEAL YOUR JOB? HERE'S THE DATA. AND MY HONEST TAKE]
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, published research on AI's impact on the job market. And it's one of the most honest things to come out of an AI company. Which is news in itself. In short: they created a metric that measures not how much AI could theoretically do, but how much it's actually doing.
Result? AI currently covers a fraction of its potential. In tech jobs, the most exposed, we're at 33%. Anyone telling you AI will replace 90% of jobs by tomorrow morning lives in a different simulation than mine. The most exposed today? Programmers, customer service, data entry. And here's the counterintuitive finding: they're on average more educated, better paid, older. Not the barista. The white-collar worker.
Unemployment? No systematic increase in exposed jobs since ChatGPT launched. The only weak signal: a slowdown in hiring for 22-to-25-year-olds. Barely statistically significant.
And now my #mrrealitycheck commentary.
1) Careful. The data comes from Claude usage — Anthropic's own product. It's as if McDonald's measured American eating habits from their own receipts. The data is real, but the sample is self-referential.
2) Also: Anthropic correlates college degrees with risk exposure. But a degree is also what gives you the tools to not be replaceable. Correlation, not causation. The graduate is more exposed but also better equipped to ride the wave. A non-trivial detail that changes the entire scenario.
3) That data point about 22-to-25-year-olds is the only one I actually care about. Because it's what I see every single day. Junior positions are disappearing. In marketing I've been watching it with my own eyes for years: the apprenticeship ladder is getting brutally longer because AI covers exactly what the junior used to do. The basic copy, the report, the preliminary analysis, first-level customer service. AI doesn't replace the professional. It replaces the rung from which the professional used to start.
As I've been saying for years: the tide keeps rising. AI is average by definition. So the winners are those who aren't average. But if your plan was "I'll start as a junior, learn, grow," that plan is much narrower today than it used to be. Anyone telling you to ignore AI because "it hasn't replaced anyone yet" is giving you the worst career advice of your life. Just like those screaming that all human jobs will vanish by tomorrow.
But by the time the effects show up in the statistics, it'll be too late to upskill. The gap between what AI can do and what it's doing is enormous. But it's closing. Be on the right side.
