tl;dr
White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks argued that AI will not drastically eliminate jobs, emphasizing its reliance on human input and supervision. He stated that AI handles intermediate tasks while humans manage end-to-end processes. A Microsoft Research study identified 40 high-risk jobs for A...
White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks challenged the growing concern that artificial intelligence will drastically eliminate jobs across many sectors. He argued that AI still depends heavily on human input and supervision to produce genuine business value, emphasizing that fears about massive job losses from AI are exaggerated. Sacks highlighted that AI handles the “middle-to-middle” tasks, while humans oversee the comprehensive, end-to-end processes.
The discussion follows a Microsoft Research study identifying 40 positions at the highest risk of AI replacement, including roles common in the crypto industry. Among these, knowledge-based jobs such as news analysts, reporters, journalists, and technical writers were noted as particularly vulnerable. Customer service representatives also ranked high on this list. By analyzing 200,000 anonymized Microsoft Bing Copilot chats, researchers evaluated how AI is used in real-world applications like information-gathering, writing, advising, and teaching. The study assigned “AI applicability scores” to various roles, with reporting and writing jobs scoring between 0.38 and 0.39, while data-driven roles like market research analysts and data scientists scored slightly lower, around 0.35 to 0.36.
The timing of the study coincides with disappointing job growth figures from the US Department of Labor, which reported only 73,000 new jobs in July, falling short of the expected 100,000. Specific to the crypto sector, job postings were also sluggish, with just 38 new roles added in July on CryptoJobsList.com and 69 on Remote3.co.
Sacks supported his viewpoint by referencing crypto entrepreneur and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji stressed that current AI is not truly autonomous and remains dependent on humans. Rather than stealing jobs, AI enables people to perform a wider variety of tasks. He illustrated this by describing AI “taking the job” of the prior AI model, such as GPT-4 replacing GPT-3, thereby updating workflows rather than eliminating human roles.