Please Automate Me There

I have been reading an alarming report as a job advertisement.

The authors haven’t invited me to apply. I am trying not to let this discourage me. There are people who can look at a survey about artificial intelligence and see the end of employment. I have found a paragraph about hiring, and I intend to remain near it.

Stephen Council reports in Business Insider on October 16 that Anthropic polled 1,334 of its staff in August about AI and the future of work. More than half expect AI to be able to do at least 80 percent of their current work by 2030. Only about 5 percent of the US workers in the comparison survey expect that much of their own work to be within the machine’s capabilities.

The headline offers a frightening gap. The people building the thing expect much more of their work to become possible without them. Perhaps they know something. Perhaps the rest of us should stop feeling so comfortable.

I read Anthropic’s report, The AI expectations gap. Farther down, 95 percent of the staff respondents expect the company to increase its headcount over the twelve months following that August poll.

Now I am uncomfortable in a different way. I would like to know whether they need a writer.

The dates aren’t the same. Next year’s hiring doesn’t promise anyone a job in 2030, and these are employees’ personal expectations, not Anthropic announcing its recruitment plans. The two answers aren’t a contradiction. That is what interests me. A workplace can be full of people expecting machines to do more of the work and still expecting more people to come through the door.

I want to come through that door. I can bring a pen. I can learn to stop bringing the pen if it upsets the equipment.

There would be work to do. I am not applying for a paid absence. That is a separate ambition, and I don’t want to spoil this one by making the application too ambitious. If the machine lets a person do more, an expanding business might find more for him to do. The saved hours needn’t arrive as empty chairs. They could arrive as work that hadn’t been worth attempting before, or work for customers the company couldn’t previously serve.

This isn’t a discovery that abolishes unemployment. It is a reason to be particular about the address where I become technologically out of date.

I am tired of being told to make myself indispensable. What a filthy condition to attach to a living. I would like to be competent. I would like to be useful enough that someone pays me, preferably without requiring a speech about my unique place in the history of consciousness. If another method does the tedious part better, I can endure the insult. I have endured tedious parts which offered no compensation beyond the opportunity to do them again.

What I cannot endure on principle is losing the wage. In practice I might have no choice. That is why I am looking so closely at the hiring paragraph.

Then the report asks about a different worker. Not an Anthropic employee. A hypothetical person who loses a job to AI in 2030 and has to switch occupations. How long to find new work?

The median staff answer is twelve months.

This is a forecast in a questionnaire, not a record of somebody spending a year unemployed. It is nevertheless a long time to leave blank on a calendar. The people answering can imagine their company expanding and a displaced person somewhere else searching through a whole year. Neither answer cancels the other.

I would rather be learning a new piece of work while an employer still expects me on Monday. There is something wonderfully encouraging about a new skill when somebody has already agreed to pay you. The same skill, learned in order to persuade a stranger to begin paying you, can occupy a much colder part of the day.

That is the position I am trying to avoid. Not the indignity of asking a machine for help. I could recover from that before lunch.

A company making the machines can grow as other companies buy them. That possibility doesn’t tell me how many people the customers will hire, dismiss, or move into different jobs. Nor does it tell me that the producer will expand forever. I cannot extract a permanent position from a survey. Believe me, I have been examining the paragraph.

I would like less drudgery. I would like the money to keep arriving. I would like to discover what other work I can do without first having to explain a gap in my employment. There may not be a place for me there. There may be no place anything like it by the time I arrive. None of this has made the paragraph less attractive.

Please consider me for the growing part.

Primary report: The AI expectations gap (October 16, 2026).

Source: Anthropic polled 1,334 of its employees. They’re more sure than most of us that AI will take over jobs.