'Don't buy the AI drama': Anthony Scaramucci dismisses mass layoff fears

Forget mass layoffs, Financier and former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci thinks AI is headed toward giving workers their weekends back, not taking their jobs away.

He argued on X that a fully realised AI economy points toward fewer working days, not fewer working people.

"If AI does everything we expect, we're moving to a three- or four-day workweek in our lifetimes," he wrote, predicting more time for recreation and a cultural shift toward valuing human interaction.

He also expects a migration toward roles built around empathy and human presence, some of which, he said, "won't even look like jobs in the traditional sense".

The underlying motivation behind many of the discussions around AI was clear in Scaramucci's statements. "The apocalyptic framing is the wrong framing," he noted. "Don't buy the AI drama."

His rationale can be explained by examples from history where predictions of the exhaustion of oil reserves turned out not to happen due to technological solutions and where Thomas Malthus's 19th-century prediction regarding the mismatch between food production and population growth was proved to be incorrect.

"We got big and fat thanks to food technology," he claimed, framing AI as the next chapter in a long pattern of innovation defusing supposed crises.

Senator Elizabeth Warren had earlier stated in May that AI has the potential of causing massive job losses, while the outplacement firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas listed AI as the top reason for 21,490 job cuts announced in April.

On the contrary, Apollo Global Management’s chief economist, Torsten Slok, has opined that there is "zero evidence" of any impact of AI on job losses throughout the economy; rather, he cites increasing hiring in AI-related positions.

This opinion has been echoed by Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s CEO, who has stated that current labour statistics do not point towards job displacement, but he has pointed out initial signals of reduced entry-level hiring.