If there’s one throughline linking us to our ancestors at the birth of industrial society, it’s the anxiety of automation. Back then it was the robber barons pushing the mechanized loom — and now it’s kids in their 20s founding tech startups.
Meet Mercor: the software that might decide whether you get that next job, or end up in the unemployment line. At least, that’s the hope for deep-pocketed investors who lavished the startup with $100 million in a recent fundraising round.
With that backing, Mercor’s valuation has skyrocketed to a massive $2 billion, which is even more eye-catching when you learn that the median age of the startup’s employees is 22.
Mercor is an AI human resources platform that matches candidates to jobs, even automating the interview process. The company says it wants to “solve the hardest problem in capitalism: matching human ability to its greatest use.” Sounds reasonable, except its “matching” is done by an unsupervised algorithm, and that “greatest use” turns out to be temporary contract work.
The majority of roles posted on Mercor are gig-work, a candy-coated term for precarious contract labor, a staffing practice popularized by Uber. Surveys have shown that gig workers face even more economic hardship than low-wage fast food workers, with nearly one in seven gig workers in the US earning less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Gig work typically corresponds to flexible service work, like driving passengers, delivering food, and grabbing groceries. But Mercor’s CEO, the 21-year-old Brendan Foody, is hoping to break more traditionally stable jobs into contractable pieces — hell, his whole business model is riding on it.
“The way people work is changing as we move toward a more fractional, gig-like work model,” Foody told TechCrunch. “Every project should be handled by the best person for the job, not just whoever is available on staff.”
The thought of a job market regulated by AI is nauseating enough. But chunking up previously full-time work into gigs is a particularly insidious goal that will be detrimental to hard-won worker’s rights. A gig worker typically works alone, without ever making contact with other workers employed by the same company. This drastically reduces the risk that they’ll unionize and fight for better wages, benefits, or legal protection.
So it’s no wonder that startup founders have frequently championed gig work as liberation — set your own hours! be your own boss! — and an inventible next step in the way peons will work. Behind closed doors, they’ve thrown gobs of cash at legislative initiatives to free themselves from having to provide pesky benefits like minimum wage, worker’s comp, and overtime pay.
Of course, when it comes to giggifying jobs, tech corporations are out leading the charge. Fighting for any edge in the AI race, big tech firms are increasingly using foreign contract workers to smooth out the rough edges their algorithms can’t — at the expense of tech jobs in the US, and underpaid workers in countries like Kenya. Google, for example, fired 40 domestic YouTube Music workers last year in the midst of a union drive, replacing them with subcontractors in India.
Though Mercor’s ambitions extend beyond the tech world, it currently looks to be a massive player in big tech’s AI subcontracting pipeline. According to TechCrunch, the company’s largest labor pool is India. So far, it’s handled over 460,000 applicants — subject matter experts hoping to snag gigs like “Finance Expert” or “STEM PHD Intelligence Analyst,” which are fancy ways to say “fact checker for AI slop.”
The goal, of course, is that the AI wranglers eventually make their own jobs obsolete, in which case the subcontracting firm abruptly closes down operations, leaving them without even the paltry wage they once had.
All together, it’s a dystopian circle: AI giants slash full-time jobs in the US, use AI-powered platforms like Mercor to turn those jobs into gig work, then punt those temporary jobs off to desperate workers across the developing world.
As tech CEOs continue to shape the labor market to their profit-driven whims, it might be time to ask: what would our ancestors do?
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