"The frenzy around OpenClaw in China — dubbed “raising a lobster,” referring to the AI agent’s red logo — captured a deeper fear among workers: Tools meant to boost productivity could soon replace them. For many, mastering OpenClaw has been less about curiosity than survival in a workplace where AI adoption is accelerating rapidly.

You can get eliminated anytime. How can you not be anxious?”

“It feels like playing Squid Game,” Shanghai-based Lambert Li, who was among the early users of OpenClaw, told Rest of World, referring to the Netflix drama where contestants compete in brutal elimination games. “You can get eliminated anytime. How can you not be anxious?” Li’s employer laid off 30% of its workforce in 2025, cutting employees who were unable to adapt quickly enough to AI.

The growth of AI has triggered global anxiety about job loss — and it is most palpable in China, where the government is pouring enormous resources into artificial intelligence, and betting on it to drive the country’s future economic growth. China has one of the world’s largest AI user bases. The massive push has caused a constant fear of redundancy among workers, coupled with the social stigma of job loss. Experts believe this could have larger economic and social implications for the country."

https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-anxiety-openclaw-jobs-redundancy/

#AI #AIAgents #China #MassUnemployment #OpenClaw

"There are no objective tests for whether financial analysis or advertising copy is “good.” Undeterred, AI companies set out to make such tests, collectively paying billions of dollars to professionals of all types to write exacting and comprehensive criteria for a job well done. Mercor, the company Katya stumbled upon, was founded in 2023 by three then-19-year-olds from the Bay Area, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, as a jobs platform that used AI interviews to match overseas engineers with tech companies. The company received so many inquiries from AI developers seeking professionals to produce training data that it decided to adapt. Last year, Mercor was valued at $10 billion, making its trio of founders the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. OpenAI has been a client; so has Anthropic.

Each of these data companies touts its stable of pedigreed experts. Mercor says around 30,000 professionals work on its platform each week, while Scale AI claims to have more than 700,000 “M.A.’s, Ph.D.’s, and college graduates.” Surge AI advertises its Supreme Court litigators, McKinsey principals, and platinum recording artists. These companies are hiring people with experience in law, finance, and coding, all areas where AI is making rapid inroads. But they’re also hiring people to produce data for practically any job you can imagine. Job listings seek chefs, management consultants, wildlife-conservation scientists, archivists, private investigators, police sergeants, reporters, teachers, and rental-counter clerks. One recent job ad called for experts in “North American early to mid-teen humor” who can, among other requirements, “explain humor using clear, logical language, including references to North American slang, trends, and social norms.” It is, as one industry veteran put it, the largest harvesting of human expertise ever attempted."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/white-collar-workers-training-ai.html

#AI #GenerativeAI #Mercor #OpenAI #Anthropic #AITraining #Automation #MassUnemployment

"So are those cracks the first signs of an A.I. jobs apocalypse? It’s too soon to say, but the employment picture has darkened. The economy added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, a shockingly low figure in a year that saw gross domestic product grow by a modest but respectable 2.2 percent. According to Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University, what we are experiencing now — a sustained period of “slow job growth and gradually rising unemployment without a real recession” — is virtually unprecedented.

Another anomaly: White-collar workers have been disproportionately affected. Blue-collar and service workers are usually hit hardest when the job market turns, while white-collar occupations enjoy a degree of insulation because they are concentrated in “safer, less cyclically sensitive sectors,” says Mr. Katz. Now, however, knowledge workers are the ones struggling.
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To be sure, this is not the first time the future of white-collar employment has been called into doubt. In the 2000s, some economists predicted that globalization would eviscerate office work much as it had manufacturing. But while a lot of jobs were sent overseas, others were simply transferred to less expensive parts of the country, and the anticipated white-collar collapse never materialized. It is very possible that the current slowdown is nothing more than a necessary correction after a period of overhiring.

But in a recent Substack post, the economist Gad Levanon of the Burning Glass Institute offered an alternative hypothesis. He noted that hiring has come to a virtual standstill in finance, insurance, accounting, consulting and tech, which are pillars of the “knowledge” economy. Mr. Levanon pointed out that companies in these areas have generally performed well of late while either trimming their head counts or keeping them largely unchanged..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/opinion/ai-jobs-white-collar-apocalpyse.html

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #MassUnemployment

"In September, payments firm Block Inc. XYZ 1.18%increase; green up pointing triangle gathered 8,000 of its employees from around the globe to California for an extravaganza celebrating the company’s 16th birthday.

The three-day affair took place at the Oakland Coliseum and Arena and had the air of a music festival rather than a corporate event, with a nighttime DJ set by Anderson .Paak.

Among the highlights: Block founder Jack Dorsey, clad in a black T-shirt with a chain necklace, held a chat on stage with hip-hop superstar Jay-Z, a Block board member. The event cost the company over $60 million.

Six months later, Dorsey announced plans to slash 40% of the workforce at the company, which owns Square and Cash App. More than 4,000 people were soon notified that they would be let go.

Dorsey, 49, cited rapidly improving artificial-intelligence models as the primary reason, fueling anxieties the technology was on the verge of wiping out white-collar jobs and devastating the economy. Just days earlier, a report that imagined such a future had sparked a market rout.

“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey said on a call
(...)
Not everyone is buying it. Rather than leading American corporations into a brave new future, some Wall Street analysts say, he is capitalizing on a chance to slash costs at a company with excessive staffing.

What began as a company focused on card-payment systems expanded into buy-now, pay-later loans, Jay-Z’s music-streaming platform and bitcoin investments. The company has improved the profitability of its core businesses, but some of its ventures are weighing on its balance sheet.
(...)
“The vast majority of these cuts were probably not due to AI,” said Dan Dolev of Mizuho Americas, noting the “significant amount of bloating” in recent years.""

https://www.wsj.com/business/jack-dorseys-latest-far-out-bet-an-ai-future-with-fewer-employees-25655cda

#AI #GenerativeaI #Block #MassUnemployment #Automation #SiliconValley

"So there are two sources of job growth. One is what we call an income effect. As people’s incomes go up, they raise the level of aggregate demand, which calls forth new jobs and new occupations, oftentimes in the service sector but also in manufacturing.

The other is what’s called a price effect: if the technological change is in the machine goods sector, then sectors that use the cheaper machinery can expand faster, which sucks in more employment as well.

This goes back to what we said about Marx’s model. Two things are happening simultaneously.

Technical change is throwing people into what he called the reserve army of labor. And the people in the reserve army of labor are being sucked up into new jobs because technological change increases aggregate income. Now, we don’t know whose income is being increased. It might be the capitalist’s income. It might be the worker’s income, but the economy doesn’t care about that. It’s aggregate income that’s being increased.

The other thing technical change does is that it lowers the price of inputs, which means that people using those inputs can expand their production at a faster rate.

The aggregate result is that jobs are being lost in one sector, but overall employment in the economy is not declining. And that means the overall tempo, not just of economic growth, but of employment and employment absorption, is going up."

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/ai-technology-productivity-growth-job-loss

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #JobMarket #MassUnemployment #Capitalism #Marx

"The MIT economist has spent decades studying the origins of economic and political decay, specializing in how institutions foster inclusive growth—or succumb to extractive systems. In the 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Acemoglu and co-writer James A. Robinson argue that nations proper because of their political institutions. In 2024, Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics, alongside Robinson and Simon Johnson, for demonstrating how political and economic institutions shape prosperity.

Acemoglu argued that while Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are weakening the country’s institutions, the president is not the root cause of the broader structural problems. He warned the country is headed down a grim path and outlined two shifts relative to AI development he sees as critical to avoiding deeper decline: cracking down on economic inequality and tempering job destruction. “If we go down this path of destroying jobs [and] creating more inequality, U.S. democracy is not going to survive,” he told Fortune.

According to Acemoglu, AI-driven job displacement could be catastrophic and further entrench inequality. He notes the U.S. is currently seeing unprecedented levels of wealth inequality, and traditional policy has failed to close the gap. “We may need wealth taxes because anything else we do today is still going to lead to this huge wealth gap that exists in this country.”

https://fortune.com/2026/02/22/who-is-daron-acemoglu-nobel-laureate-ai-job-layoffs-economic-inequality-donald-trump/

#USA #Trump #Democracy #Authoritarianism #Inequality #MassUnemployment #AI

"How any AI system behaves depends on how it is programmed and prompted and what data it possesses. Anthropic set Claude a goal, then blocked all ethical ways of achieving it, leaving “blackmail” the only option. As its own report acknowledged, “We deliberately… presented models with no other way to achieve their goals”. Researchers determined a particular outcome from the start and then acted surprised when the machine “chose” that outcome.

A critical paper from the UK AI Security Institute compared such research to early investigations into the linguistic capacities of chimpanzees, researchers in both cases imputing “beliefs and desires to non-human agents… when they act in ways that superficially resemble people”. It chided Anthropic researchers for having “conveniently encouraged the model to produce the unethical behaviour”.

The idea of AI as an existential menace to humanity is not simply overblown, it also hides the real threat AI poses, not in the future but in the present – the result of actions not of machines but of humans."

https://observer.co.uk/news/opinion-and-ideas/article/ai-may-well-pose-a-threat-to-jobs-but-its-the-tech-dystopia-thats-the-real-worry

#AI #GenerativeAI #MassUnemployment #BigTech #TechDystopia

"Silicon Valley leaders are enamored of one policy Hail Mary: the establishment of a universal basic income, in which the government would provide all adults with $1,500 a month or so, no strings attached and in perpetuity. It’s not as crazy an idea as it sounds; think of it as Social Security for everyone, or an extension of the earned-income tax credit to families without any earned income. The cash would ensure that every family kept its head above water, and redistribute the wealth generated by rising productivity. “People will be freed up to spend more time with people they care about, care for people, appreciate art and nature, or work toward social good,” Sam Altman of OpenAI has argued.

But UBI is a dystopian outcome, not a utopian one. For families to thrive in this new post-work paradigm, the government would need to redistribute a lot more than $1,500 per person per month, necessitating confiscatory taxes on corporations—taxes they would fight tooth and nail. The bigger problem would be that Americans would hate a world without work, where the jobless rate floats at 30 percent instead of 4 percent."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/ai-white-collar-jobs/686031/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTye5UuEDMsmIn8A8Cc1O-vk0

#AI #GenerativeAI #WhiteCollarWork #MassUnemployment #UBI #SiliconValley

"Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at Forrester, says the fears that shook the stock market are based on sentiment and not evidence: no one has had time to evaluate the performance of an Opus 4.6-powered wealth manager.

“It’s a kneejerk reaction,” he said. “How true is it? Look, there’s plenty of leaders out there who thought, I can replace people with AI at the beginning. And a lot of people acted on that. And I think one of the things that’s being found out is that for a lot of cases, no, it hasn’t panned out.”

Aaron Rosenberg, a partner at venture capital firm Radical Ventures, – whose investments include leading AI firm Cohere – and former head of strategy and operations at Google’s AI unit DeepMind, says the impact of AI is being underestimated in the long term but adoption of groundbreaking models will not be uniform.

“History shows a repeated pattern of there being a significant lag between a technology working in a lab and it permeating the wider economy, as well as a chasm between early adopters and the majority of users,” he says."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/13/ai-effects-on-business-industry-evidence-to-allay-investor-fears

#AI #GenerativeAI #Stocks #StockExchange #AIBubble #MassUnemployment

"Data released this week offers a striking corrective to the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US economy as a whole. While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth.

My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past decade.

This shift aligns with the productivity “J-curve” that my colleagues and I have explored in earlier research. General-purpose technologies, from the steam engine to the computer, do not deliver immediate gains. Instead, they require a period of massive, often unmeasured investment in intangible capital — reorganising business processes, retraining the workforce and developing new business models. During this phase, measured productivity is suppressed as resources are diverted to investments. The updated 2025 US data suggests we are now transitioning out of this investment phase into a harvest phase where those earlier efforts begin to manifest as measurable output."

https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419dc5

#AI #GenerativeAI #Productivity #Automation #MassUnemployment #Economy