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Title: Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All
Human Workers Everywhere
Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/04/20/...
TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup "whose founder - and
the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch - is being
skewered on X..." Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its
founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup's goal, Besiroglu
wrote, is "the full automation of all work" and "the full automation of the
economy." Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker
with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the
data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any
job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize's total addressable market
by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid. "The market potential
here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per
year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times
greater, around $60 trillion per year," he wrote. Besiroglu did, however,
clarify to TechCrunch that "our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar
work" rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics... Besiroglu
argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually
enrich humans, not impoverish them, through "explosive economic growth." He
points to a paper he published on the topic. "Completely automating labor
could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods
and services that we can't even imagine today," he told TechCrunch.
TechCrunch wonders how jobless humans will produce goods - and whether wealth
will simply concentrate around whoever owns the agents. But they do concede
that Besiroglu may be right that "If each human worker has a personal crew of
agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could
follow..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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