What do people do all day?

A recent Axios post repeats Dario Amodei’s warning that

AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs

and con­tinues (in the stac­cato house style, so super strange) to dwell on the poten­tial for disruption, without ever both­ering to clarify: how many entry-level white-collar jobs are there, exactly?

I think most AI discourse, whether it’s hype or cau­tion or both, suf­fers from a lack of clarity around what people actu­ally do in the U.S. economy.

I’m not saying AI won’t be disruptive, and I’m def­i­nitely not saying I am some super expert on the struc­ture of the U.S. labor force. I’m just saying, I don’t believe any­body writing these posts could answer basic ques­tions about that labor force if you asked them.

Test yourself:

• About how many people in the U.S. have jobs classified as “computer and mathematical occupations”?
• About how many have “personal care and service occupations”?
• “Construction and extraction occupations”?
• “Sales and related occupations”?

And what is each cat­e­gory as a per­centage of total U.S. employment?

You look at the BLS data tables and there are, for sure, fat rows ripe for disruption. (Note that the modest total in farming doesn’t include actual farmworkers, who are not rep­re­sented in this data; I sus­pect there are more dis­tor­tions of this kind throughout the hands-on part of the economy.) The BLS doesn’t give us a figure for “entry-level white-collar jobs”—a doubly fuzzy cat­e­gory — but you can look at the mag­ni­tudes and do some noodling. Forty mil­lion people in “professional and related occupations” overall, of which … what? Ten per­cent are entry-level? Half of that gets you two mil­lion jobs.

You might do the math dif­fer­ently and arrive at num­bers that are indeed big and scary — but then you will have done the math, which puts you, in this case, ahead of Axios.

And maybe, con­tin­uing your investigation, you’ll want to cross-reference that data with this chart — 

—in which the blue bars are as close a proxy for “maybe AI can do it” as you’ll find!