“An AI never had a girlfriend break up with it.” Music producer Robbie Hiser said that to CBS News’ 60 Minutes while explaining why he is not worried about teaching a machine his trade. Hiser trained AI models for Mercor, a company that pays freelancers to make systems like ChatGPT and Claude better at subjects from finance to poetry. CBS described Mercor as a multibillion-dollar company with more than 100,000 freelancers on its roster.
Hiser and the other trainers CBS spoke to said they do not see themselves as training their way out of work. “AI doesn’t have any life experience to pull from,” Hiser said, and in his view great songwriting will always need a human touch.
The optimist’s case
Mercor CEO Brendan Foody calls the shift a natural evolution. His argument, as CBS reported it, is that people will be freed from the dull, repetitive parts of a job and left with more time for meaningful work. AI training is currently the fourth-fastest-growing job category in America on LinkedIn, according to CBS, and work at Mercor can pay $20 or even $200 an hour. To Foody, it is the career of the future.
In Columbus, Ohio, the law firm Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease worked with Stanford University’s Liftlab to build AI personas modeled on the experience and philosophy of some of its senior lawyers. The personas give feedback on documents from the point of view of individual partners. Partner Kim Herlihy, a trial lawyer, said the tool is built to optimize, not to replace. “AI is never going to walk into the courtroom and give an opening statement to the jury,” she said.
The economist’s warning
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu sees it differently. “What we are living through with AI is unprecedented,” he told 60 Minutes. “The first phase of the Industrial Revolution took 80 years. Today it’s taking place in one or two years.” If nothing is done and the U.S. stays on its present course, he said, unemployment could triple within a decade in the worst case.
He accepted that people will find work training AI. But “the number of people they’re employing in these positions is small relative to the number of people who will be replaced,” Acemoglu said. “That’s the whole point of automation.”
The public mood leans his way. CBS cited a Pew Research study finding that nearly three-fourths of Americans fear AI is coming for their jobs, and a September McKinsey Global Institute report that found AI could force 11 million U.S. workers into new careers by 2035. Unemployment is generally steady for now, but research from Stanford shows hiring is down for young people in the most AI-exposed jobs such as software development. Research from the U.S. Census found hiring and wages among recent college graduates in AI-exposed majors have declined.
Clara Shih, who ran major AI divisions at Salesforce and then Meta, said a product that once took dozens of people to conceive, prototype and deliver can now be done by a few people using AI agents. She quit her tech job in January and started a nonprofit, the New Work Foundation, to help young workers. “AI is just really good at doing those now,” she said of first-draft memos and market research once handed to juniors. Her worry goes beyond paychecks: “It’s people’s sense of self-worth. It’s the fracturing of communities.”
Acemoglu said the outcome is still a matter of choice. Companies could design AI to make humans better rather than expendable, he said, and government could write a tax code that rewards hiring real people. But he warned the window to act is closing.
