The AI boom could cut your pay

The world could get richer thanks to AI, and you could still end up with less money in your pocket.

That's one of three futures Anthropic modelled out to 2030. In the most extreme one, the economy grows about 15% a year. Pay for desk jobs like marketing, finance and legal ends up more than 10% lower than it would have been, while hands-on work like the trades ends up about a third better paid.

Today, workers in the US take home about 60% of everything the economy makes. In that extreme scenario, it falls to about 45%.

The way I read it, the money moves from the people doing the work to the people who own the machines doing it. Anthropic puts no odds on it, and you don't need the extreme case for the lesson to apply.

What you sell is a mix of routine work and your judgement, the experience that tells you what to do and what to leave out. AI keeps getting cheaper at the routine part, so your customers will expect to pay less for it.

Let AI do the routine work inside your own business, and find a way to charge more for your judgement.