Taken verbatim from Anthropic’s Economic Policy Framework (https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential/epf):

> We are not seeking job displacement. We are working to prevent or minimize it. Some amount of displacement, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.

> Whatever happens, we are on the side of people. We are trying to solve these problems. We take no satisfaction in contributing to them, and we are not working to make them more likely.

The cognitive dissonance/doublespeak/hypocrisy (pick one) is absolutely insane.

They are concurrently:

1. creating and marketing products that are explicitly trying to automate, if not entire professions, at least big parts of them

2. edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause

3. directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)

Bad takes.

> edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause

Your own job, assuming you're in the software industry, is to automate and eliminate people's jobs. How many jobs do you think it has eliminated? Do you feel you are responsible for your products? Is it ethical to do your job without thinking about and discussing its impacts?

My take: being also in the industry, software has created way more jobs, new businesses, new fields than the jobs it has eliminated. Nobody knows how AI will turn out, it being still at the beginning, although it will certainly have big impact and job displacement will be substantial. The hope is that it will be net plus for the society. At least Anthropic is talking about it. I never heard of, for example DeepSeek's position about the impacts of their products.

> directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)

If you've volunteered for non-profits, you'd find that many of them are underfunded AND understaffed. Removing burdens on any part of their work, especially areas that aren't directly related to their core services, is hugely beneficial. It's easy to criticize from behind the keyboard.

Unfortunately opinions like yours scratch an itch of the HN crowd. Regardless of objectivity.

Hey, think critically about where you are on the internet. You're on a message board run by YCombinator, who's stated goal is to teach people to run startups. Startups are inherently disruptive. When one business disrupts another, people lose their jobs.

Companies going out of business, either because of disruption, or because they ran themselves poorly, or other reasons, is part of the normal business cycle. Otherwise, we'd end up doing things like making digital cameras illegal because the people who worked in film labs lost their jobs. (Which is absurd!)

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I don't see any cognitive dissonance in what you quote. Some people will lose jobs to AI. Anthropic wants to train people who lose jobs to AI.

“We are not seeking virtual torture caused by Roko’s Basilisk. We are working to prevent or minimize virtual torture caused by it. Some amount of virtual torture, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.”