You often hear that AI will replace us all and that Skynet will take over, but Anthropic’s new initiative should provide a clearer view of how LLMs impact the economy and labor market. There’s a lot of uncertainty, anxiety, and misunderstanding around AI’s capabilities, so it’s crucial that regulations are based on actual data. I really appreciate them open-sourcing the dataset, but I won’t lie—knowing that all my conversations might potentially end up in research data is a little unnerving, even if it’s anonymized.
These kinds of longitudinal analyses can give us new insights into AI and the job market. For example, we’ll be able to monitor changes in the depth of AI use within occupations. If it remains the case that AI is used only for certain tasks, and only a few jobs use AI for the vast majority of their tasks, the future might be one where most current jobs evolve rather than disappear. We can also monitor the ratio of automation to augmentation, providing signals of areas where automation is becoming more prevalent.
Our research gives data on how AI is being used, but it doesn’t provide policy prescriptions. Answers to questions about how to prepare for AI’s impact on the labor market can’t come directly from research in isolation; instead, they’ll come from a combination of evidence, values, and experience from broad perspectives.
Source: anthropic.com