White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks has downplayed growing concerns that artificial intelligence will lead to widespread job displacement, emphasizing that human oversight remains essential for generating real business value.
His remarks follow a report by Microsoft researchers listing 40 jobs most vulnerable to AI replacement — several of which are in the crypto sector.
In a post on X Saturday, Sacks called the fears of mass AI-driven unemployment “overhyped,” noting that AI still requires human prompting and verification to be effective.
“AI handles the middle-to-middle tasks, but humans are still responsible for the end-to-end processes,” he explained.
Microsoft Study Suggests Some Crypto Jobs May Be at Risk
A recent study by Microsoft Research suggests that knowledge-based roles—such as news analysts, reporters, journalists, and technical writers—are among the most vulnerable to AI disruption in the future, including similar positions within the crypto industry.
Customer service representatives also ranked high on the list of at-risk jobs.
Researchers analyzed 200,000 anonymized chats from Microsoft Bing Copilot to examine how AI is being used in real-world scenarios. They found that AI is primarily applied to tasks involving information-gathering, writing, advising, and teaching.
To evaluate each role, they developed an “AI applicability score” based on how well AI can complete specific job tasks. Reporting and writing roles received relatively high scores between 0.38 and 0.39, while more data-heavy roles like market research analysts and data scientists scored slightly lower, between 0.35 and 0.36.
The study arrives amid concerning job growth figures, with the U.S. Department of Labor reporting only 73,000 new jobs in July—well below the 100,000 projected by Dow Jones.
In the crypto sector, hiring remains sluggish as well. Only 38 new roles were posted on CryptoJobsList.com in July, while Remote3.co added just 69 positions.
Sacks Aligns with Crypto Entrepreneur on AI Job Loss Concerns
Sacks drew support for his position by referencing a post from former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, who questioned prevailing fears about AI displacing human workers.
Balaji argued that today’s AI remains fundamentally limited: “Today’s AI is not truly agentic because it’s not truly independent of you,” he said. “AI doesn’t take your job—it lets you do any job.”
He added that if AI is replacing anything, it’s simply the previous version of itself.
“For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job, and GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image generation, AI code generation, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model. Hence, AI takes the job of the previous AI.”
