- Anthropic's chief of staff fears AI could soon end traditional employment.
- Avital Balwit wrote a personal essay highlighting AI's potential impact on the workforce.
- She believes the rise of AI technology will replace many human job functions.
A 25-year-old Anthropic employee says she's prepping for a post-work society that may arrive sooner than some people think.
Avital Balwit, who is chief of staff to the CEO at leading AI company Anthropic, outlined her thoughts on what AI might do to employment in a personal essay for Palladium magazine.
"I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work," she wrote. "I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it."
Balwit said she was being "confronted with something more capable and general" with "every iteration of" Anthropic's AI model.
She theorized that her job and many others are heading for obsolescence, and those who ignore the prospect are largely in denial.
"The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial," Balwit wrote, adding that the shared goal of AI is to create a system that can do anything.
Palladium noted that the essay was written in Balwit's personal capacity and did not reflect Anthropic's views.
The rise of generative AI has long caused anxiety about the risk of mass job losses, especially in the knowledge economy. Leading figures in the industry, including Elon Musk and Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman, have voiced similar concerns.
Freelancers have previously complained that the widespread adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has stolen potential work.
Several content writers have said work opportunities dried up after the early AI boom.
Balwit wrote that freelance writing had always been an "oversubscribed skillset, and the introduction of language models has further intensified competition."
"The economically and politically relevant comparison on most tasks is not whether the language model is better than the best human, it is whether they are better than the human who would otherwise do that task," she wrote.
Balwit did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.