Focus the conversation on tasks, not titles-what parts of the job may become easier and what parts will require more human judgment, context, and problem-solving. Be explicit about where AI fits and where it doesn't. Often, the aim of introducing AI is to strip out busywork so people can spend more time on problem-solving and generating ideas that move the work forward.
He used chess as an example: 15 to 20 years ago, a human checking AI's output could beat an AI or a human playing alone. Now, AI can beat people without that layer of human supervision. Amodei, who cofounded AI lab Anthropic in 2021, added that the same transition would happen in software engineering. "We're already in our centaur phase for software," Amodei said. "During that centaur phase, if anything, the demand for software engineers may go up. But the period may be very brief."
For the past three years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has been dominated by a single, anxious question: What will be left for us to do? As large language models began writing code, drafting legal briefs, and composing poetry, the prevailing assumption was that human cognitive labor was being commoditized. We braced for a world where thinking was outsourced to the cloud, rendering our hard-won mental skills, writing, logic, and structural reasoning relics of a pre-automated past.