Surely we get to choose what AI technology we want to implement

Tim Wu, A ‘White-Collar Blood Bath’ Doesn’t Have to Be Our Fate, NYTimes, June 24, 2025.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the A.I. company Anthropic, recently predicted that half of entry-level positions in fields like law, consulting and finance could meet this fate in just a few years. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, has predicted that A.I. will replace many of Meta’s programmers within the next year or two.

Optimists push back with a different prediction, forecasting that A.I. won’t replace white-collar workers but will rather serve as a tool that makes them more productive. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the computer chip maker Nvidia, has argued that “you’re not going to lose your job to an A.I., but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses A.I.”

Both sides in this debate are making the same mistake: They treat the question as one of fate rather than choice. Instead of asking which future is coming, we should be asking which future we want: one in which humans are replaced or only augmented?

Right! We get to choose.

The distinction between augmentation and replacement can be subtle. Any technology — from the stone ax onward — replaces some human work in the course of augmenting it. The key question is whether the tool enhances our abilities while still leaving us in control of how to use it. As Steve Jobs once put it, a computer can be “a bicycle of the mind.” Just as a word processor allows writers to write without having to laboriously correct and retype manuscripts, so too A.I. should help humans devote ourselves to our most significant and interesting challenges. [...]

The augmentation approach to A.I. isn’t just about preserving jobs (though that’s important, too). It’s also about keeping human interests central to our future. That may seem like an obvious goal, yet it is alarmingly easy to lose sight of. All systems are vulnerable to mission drift — when they gradually, often imperceptibly diverge from their original purpose — but the risk is compounded if we allow autonomous A.I. systems to run the show.

Rebuilding the middle class:

Augmentation is not any kind of panacea: In yielding greater efficiencies, it will lead to job loss. But that was also true of augmenting technologies like the tractor and the personal computer, innovations that were worth their disruptive trade-offs.

There’s a world of difference between productivity gains and a systematic plan of industry-eliminating unemployment. Indeed, as the economist David Autor argues, A.I., done right, could help rebuild the middle class by giving a broader range of workers access to expertise such as software coding that is currently concentrated among higher-skilled workers. It all depends on how the technology is implemented.

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