This post was originally published on this site.
Will artificial intelligence (AI) eventually replace humans in the workplace? The founder of Mechanize seems to think so.
The startup — whose launch was covered by a Saturday (April 19) TechCrunch report — debuted last week with that mission, drawing some controversy in the process.
“Mechanize will build virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data to enable the full automation of all work,” Tamay Besiroglu wrote in a post on X.
The company itself took things one step further, promising the full automation of the economy, according to its X announcement.
“We will achieve this by creating simulated environments and evaluations that capture the full scope of what people do at their jobs,” Mechanize said. “This includes using a computer, completing long-horizon tasks that lack clear criteria for success, coordinating with others, and reprioritizing in the face of obstacles and interruptions.”
According to TechCrunch, Besiroglu calculated Mechanize’s total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are paid, roughly $60 trillion per year on a global scale.
However, he told the news outlet that “our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work” and not manual labor jobs that would use robotics.
The report noted that the response to this launch was “brutal,” with one X user arguing that the “automation of most human labor … will be a huge loss for most humans.”
As PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, the question of whether AI will make human workers obsolete or make them more valuable is one that concerns many workers.
However, MIT economics professor David Autor argues that AI will in most cases augment workers rather than replace them.
“There are two competing visions of AI. One is machines make us irrelevant. Another is machines make us more useful. I think the latter has a lot to recommend it,” Autor said at the 2025 MIT AI Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He pointed to a historical precedent. “Over the last 200 years, we have automated so much of what we do. We have mechanized. We have moved ourselves out of agriculture, out of manufacturing, out of back-breaking toil,” Autor said. Yet, “We have made labor more valuable during that period.”
Still, workers are worried. Research by PYMNTS Intelligence — from the report “GenAI: A Generational Look at AI Usage and Attitudes” — shows that 54% of respondents think AI poses a “significant risk” of widespread job displacement.
These concerns span industries and demographics, though some are more worried than others. Workers in the technology sector and non-customer-facing roles were the most concerned (58%), while healthcare and education workers were less so, at a respective 48% and 52%.