Is AI harvesting your knowledge on the cheap?
About this episode
The episode discusses how AI is reshaping work and the implications for skilled labor and the job market.
AI is coming for your job — but not in the way you think. Karen says the real shock isn’t mass replacement (yet). It’s that AI is already reshaping work into something more precarious, more fragmented, and easier to squeeze. Data annotation and “AI training” are booming - but now the growth is in skilled labour. AI firms are hoovering up graduates and specialists to teach models the expertise they still can’t reliably produce. That’s the uncomfortable irony of “PhD‑capable” AI: to get there, it needs real PhDs (and near‑PhDs) feeding it knowledge, task by task. As Sam Altman once put it: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” Meanwhile, the graduate job market is shrinking fast. Is this the “uberisation” of knowledge work - stable careers broken into gigs, paid by the piece, constantly monitored - with workers training the systems that may later deskill or replace them? Nicky follows the dark logic of the online “health information ecosystem” - a system that profits from panic. A deadly hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship should be a contained public‑health story (serious for passengers, near‑zero risk…
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