Monologue: The AI Job Loss Con

In this week’s monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through how the media is misleading you about AI job loss as a form of propaganda for OpenAI and Anthropic - and the Business Idiots behind it.

CNN - The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine - https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/30/business/anthropic-amodei-ai-jobs-nightcap
Oxford Economics - Educated but unemployed, a rising reality for college grads - https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/US-Educated-but-unemployed-a-rising-reality-for-college-grads.pdf  
Axios - AI is keeping recent college grads out of work - https://www.axios.com/2025/05/29/ai-college-grads-work-jobs

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone media. Hell, and welcome to this week's Better
Offline Monologue. You best bet I'm your host ed ziit
trum what Now? This week, you've probably heard some scary
numbers that fifty percent of all white collar jobs will
be replaced in the next one to five years. And

(00:22):
it's come directly from despicable Carnival Barker Dario ama Day.
I like calling him Warrio. It's funny. He's the CEO
of Anthropic and he repeated this egregious lie to both
Axios and CNN, leading to the most of the rest
of the media just quoting it advobating without thinking. Now,
to be specific, he said that AI would wipe out
half of all entry level white collar jobs and spike

(00:44):
unemployment to ten to twenty percent in the next one
to five years. It's always this fucking he always says like, oh,
it's that one year, all that five years. I don't know, mate,
how werem I meant to know? I'm just making shit up.
And this is the entire quote, by the way, the
fundament of at least different news stories and an egregious
line of shit. Now, to quote the excellent Allison Morrow

(01:05):
of CNN, Amiday didn't cite any research or evidence to
that fifty percent estimate, and she added that Ammaday is
a salesman and it's in his interest to make his
product appear to be inevitable and so powerful it's scary,
and that little of what Ammaday told Axios was new,
but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to
draw attention to anthropics work. I've said it once and

(01:26):
I'll say it again. Alison Morrow may be one of
the best living business reporters. Everyone should be taking notes
from her. She is the best. She was on the
price Gouging, she's been on AI. She's really incredible. I'm
saying this because Allison's been on the show and she rocks.
She'll be back, and also because I'm pretty critical of
the media and I need to give credit where it's
due now. In the same week, Oxford Economics put out

(01:47):
a report about how entry level workers were facing a
job crisis and vaguely mentioned in the preview of the
report that there are signs that entry level positions are
being displaced by artificial intelligence and higher rates, causing Axios
to run an article claiming that they're was now hard
evidence that AI was driving job loss. I should also
add Kevin Rouse, you know, the marketing intern that also
runs a New York Times column. He just quoted that

(02:09):
adverbatum like that. That's the exact quote he used in
a story in the New York Times. Didn't even bother
opening the fucking thing. Now. One might think, anyway that
the report would have like, I don't know hard evidence
based on what Axio said, and you'd be wrong. On
the very first page, it says that there are signs
that entry level positions are being displaced by official intelligence
at higher rates. On page three, it claims that the

(02:29):
higher adoption rates by information companies, along with the sheer
employment declines in some roles since twenty twenty two, suggested
some displacement effect from AI, and digging deeper, the largest
displacement seems to be entry level jobs normally filled by
recent graduates, and that is the whole argument that some
roles that could maybe be automated with generative AI have
seen declines and employment and so called information companies have

(02:52):
been adopting AA at supposed and undisclosed rates, meaning that
AI has taken these jobs. Did these companies actually replace
workers with AI who knows no need to bother checking
that or whether one can actually replace any of these
roles with AI. Boast the report done, sold, go home,
smoke a cigarette. You did it, Champ, You put out
your fucking report, even if the report's bullshit. Actually the

(03:13):
rest of the report's pretty good. It's just this weird bit.
I'm pretty sure they just did four pr They knew
that people would just go, oh my god, nurs Oh
my goodness. AI is taking the jobs. I must cover that,
except the people doing it on old people. They're people.
I'm thirty nine years old, they're my age, maybe a
little older, maybe a little younger. It's fucking terrifying. And like,

(03:36):
while are absolutely some jobs being taken by AI, there
is to this point little or no research that suggested
that it's happening at scale. And I must be clear
that I don't want this to happen. I'm just saying,
tell the fucking truth. The easiest way to prove me wrong,
by the way, would be to find an actual company
that's done it. Show me a company that has actually
replaced full employees with generative AI. Show me the job

(03:58):
that the AI is doing and how it is doing it,
and then the output that it creates do not bring
me a goddamn call center. I swear to Christ They've
been trying to automate those since they invented them. They've
already been doing automation before large language models. If anyone
actually looked into anything in technology, they would know the
companies have been doing this already. It makes me feel insane,

(04:19):
and you can't show me this because it isn't fucking happening,
and I'm sick of people pretending it is. These articles
do not serve the public. They do not inform the public.
They are propaganda for companies like open Ai, Anthropic, and
Microsoft to pretend that their software does more than it
can now or ever will, so that they can continue
raising billions of dollars or raising their market caps. The

(04:42):
media refuses to dig too deep because doing so would
move against the will of the markets and their editors,
or worse still, they just don't care enough to check
whether what they're saying is true. It's the same insincere,
craven bullshit we saw with the metaverse, with Crypto, with
the return to office Demands of twenty one and twenty
twenty two, with Quiet Quitting with companies price gouging and
blaming it on inflation. Reporters are far too willing to

(05:04):
follow exactly what they think the world wants to read,
rather than actually sharing the truth or learning anything themselves.
And my next episode is going to be a three
parter about why I think this keeps happening. Our economy
is dominated by people that are fully disconnected from the
world around them, that buy things and sell things for
other people that are disconnected to I call them business idiots,

(05:26):
and they're everywhere, and I can't wait to tell you
all about the next week. They turn my bloody stomach,
but I love you listeners, and you're gonna love this