Top Anthropic executive Mike Krieger’s message to college graduates and their parents nervous about AI is that they’re not the only ones going through this process.
“I think what I tell folks is you’re not alone,” Krieger told tech journalist Alex Heath during a recent episode of Heath’s “Access” podcast. “This is a shared kind of complicated thing.”
Krieger, who cofounded Instagram, said he receives “a whole class of email” from people in his broader social circle who are parents of soon-to-be college graduates. One of his messages is that there will continue to be innately human areas that AI won’t affect anytime soon.
“I think the things that will still remain human, and ineffable, and important are still relationships and curiosity and creativity and the ability to organize people towards an end,” he said. “I don’t see AI replacing that anytime soon.”
Since January, Krieger has helped lead Anthropic Labs, a unit dedicated to “incubating experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities,” as the AI startup described it at the time. Previously, Krieger was Anthropic’s chief product officer.
Anthropic has become one of the most outspoken AI companies when it comes to talking about job displacement. Its CEO Dario Amodei, has repeatedly warned that AI will wipe out up to half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.
AI executives have increasingly discussed their advice for those joining the workforce, even as the debate about the extent of displacement rages on.
Krieger said it’s important to understand that if someone is unhappy in this situation, it won’t always remain that way.
“Even if in the current moment with all the uncertainty, maybe our friend’s kid doesn’t land in exactly the job that they wanted, things will continue to shift,” he said. “Nothing is set in stone.”
Like others, Krieger emphasized that people who are open to change will be better able to navigate this moment.
“I think if people remain curious and actively exploring what the frontier looks like, they might then either be part of creating a whole new category of jobs or progressing to a different place in their own companies,” he said.
