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  • Anthropic Economic Index: insights from Claude 3.7 Sonnet – Anthropic

    Briefly, our latest results are the following: Since the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we’ve observed a rise in the share of usage for coding, as well as educational, science, and healthcare applications; People use Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s new “extended thinking” mode predominantly for technical tasks, including those associated with occupations like computer science researchers, software developers, multimedia animators, and video game designers; We’re releasing data on augmentation / automation breakdowns on a task- and occupation-level. For example, tasks associated with copywriters and editors show the highest amount of task iteration, where the human and model co-write something together. By contrast, tasks associated with translators and interpreters show among the highest amounts of directive behavior—where the model completes the task with minimal human involvement.

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  • The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach – Scott Smitelli

    Whatever this job has given you—and to be crystal clear it has given you most of the down payment on a house—it is not enough to offset this sense of constant dread. Whatever you have given to this job, certainly things that cannot ever be quantified on a bank statement, there are now pieces of yourself that are missing. Pieces you didn’t even realize were being given away. Pieces that, in this moment, you worry you might never get back.

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  • We are dedicated to the American public. And we aren’t done yet. – 18F Group

    For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers. However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET. 18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.

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  • Desperate for work, translators train the AI that’s putting them out of work – Rest of World

    As a teenager, Pelin Türkmen dreamed of becoming an interpreter, translating English into Turkish, and vice versa, in real time. She imagined jet-setting around the world with diplomats and scholars, and participating in history-making events. Her tasks one recent January morning didn’t figure in her dreams. […]

    The new roles require much less skill and effort than translation, Türkmen said. For instance, she spent a year on her master’s thesis studying Samuel Beckett’s self-translation of his play Endgame from French to English. More recently, for her Ph.D. in translation studies, she studied for more than two years about the anti-feminist discourse in the Turkish translation of French author Pierre Loti’s 1906 novel, Les Désenchantées. In contrast, working on an AI prompt takes about 20 minutes.

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  • A day in the life of a jobless copywriter – The Subtext

    He applies for a job that was posted a minute ago and has two thousand applications. He feels like a seagull fighting over a chip. Then he feels like the chip. Then he puts some chips in the oven but forgets to turn the oven on. This is how his mind works these days. There is nobody at home with the jobless copywriter for nobody else is jobless – if you count school as a job and he definitely does.

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  • ‘Scared and betrayed’ – workers are reeling from chaos at federal agencies – The Verge

    It’s long been a strategy in Trump world to “flood the zone” with information, making it hard for the media and the public to know where to look, or where to concentrate their opposition. That feeling of disorientation is magnified for federal workers in the past couple weeks, as they wade through the eye of the storm. “These executive orders are flying fast and furious. I think that’s on purpose,” says one federal worker. “They’re giving agencies very little time to comply and even decide if they want to or not because there’s so much.” […]

    “Nobody knows if they’ll have a job tomorrow, especially if your agency works on something that the Trump administration seems to be targeting,” says one federal worker. That might include anything from education to gender to climate-related issues. But even if they are fired, some workers are questioning if it would even be worth fighting for their jobs back. “This isn’t the job I loved and wanted,” says the DOL employee. “This is like some evil demon took it over.” […]

    The crackdown on things like work from home or acknowledging gender has created an atmosphere of paranoia and hyper vigilance. Many federal employees have moved work-related conversations to encrypted messaging app Signal. And the tech industry’s embrace of right wing politics and politicians has created a sense of distrust, a federal contractor says, with people fearing that communication on other platforms could be leaked by pro-Trump companies.

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  • 93% of IT leaders see value in AI agents but struggle to deliver, Salesforce finds – VentureBeat

    “A digital labor workforce can act autonomously in a business to successfully carry out both simple and complex tasks, enabling increased productivity and efficiency,” said Comstock. He noted that enterprises will eventually move beyond simple AI agents to “super agents,” which don’t just respond to a single command, but pursue a goal and perform complex human tasks.

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  • Why Starmer and Reeves are pinning their hopes on AI to drive growth in UK – The Guardian

    Underneath all of this is the implication that efficiency – through AI automating certain tasks – means redundancies. The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has suggested that more than 40% of tasks performed by public sector workers could be automated partly by AI and the government could bank those efficiency gains by “reducing the size of the public-sector workforce accordingly”. TBI also estimates that AI could displace between 1m and 3m private-sector jobs in the UK, though it stresses the net rise in unemployment will be in the low hundreds of thousands because the technology will create new jobs, too. Worried lawyers, finance professionals, coders, graphic designers and copywriters – a handful of sectors that might be affected – will have to take that on faith. This is the flipside of improved productivity.

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  • ‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI – The Guardian

    Under the 50-point AI action plan, an area of Oxfordshire near the headquarters of the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham will be designated the first AI growth zone. It will have fast-tracked planning arrangements for data centres as the government seeks to reposition Britain as a place where AI innovators believe they can build trillion-pound companies. Further zones will be created in as-yet-unnamed “de-industrialised areas of the country with access to power”. Multibillion-pound contracts will be signed to build the new public “compute” capacity – the microchips, processing units, memory and cabling that physically enable AI. There will also be a new “supercomputer”, which the government boasts will have sufficient AI power to play itself at chess half a million times a second. Sounding a note of caution, the Ada Lovelace Institute called for “a roadmap for addressing broader AI harms”, and stressed that piloting AI in the public sector “will have real-world impacts on people”.

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  • The problem with AI is about power, not technology – Jacobin

    Employers invoke the term AI to tell a story in which technological progress, union busting, and labor degradation are synonymous. However, this degradation is not a quality of the technology itself but rather of the relationship between capital and labor. The current discussion around AI and the future of work is the latest development in a longer history of employers seeking to undermine worker power by claiming that human labor is losing its value and that technological progress, rather than human agents, is responsible. […]

    AI, in other words, is not a revolutionary technology, but rather a story about technology. Over the course of the past century, unions have struggled to counter employers’ use of the ideological power of technological utopianism, or the idea that technology itself will produce an ideal, frictionless society. (Just one telling example of this is the name General Motors gave its pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair: Futurama.) AI is yet another chapter in this story of technological utopianism to degrade labor by rhetorically obscuring it. If labor unions understand changes to the means of production outside the terms of technological progress, it will become easier for unions to negotiate terms here and now, rather than debate what effect they might have in a vague, all too speculative future.

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  • AI is making Philippine call center work more efficient, for better and worse – Rest of World

    Bajala says each of his calls at Concentrix is monitored by an artificial intelligence (AI) program that checks his performance. He says his volume of calls has increased under the AI’s watch. At his previous call center job, without an AI program, he answered at most 30 calls per eight-hour shift. Now, he gets through that many before lunchtime. He gets help from an AI “co-pilot,” an assistant that pulls up caller information and makes suggestions in real time. “The co-pilot is helpful,” he says. “But I have to please the AI. The average handling time for each call is 5 to 7 minutes. I can’t go beyond that.” “It’s like we’ve become the robots,” he said. […]

    It works like this, the workers said: a sentiment analysis program could be deployed in real time to detect the mood of a conversation. It could also work retroactively, as part of an advanced speech analysis program that transcribes the conversation and judges the emotional state of the agent and caller. Bajala said the program scores him on his tone, his pitch, the mood of the call, his use of positive language, if he avoided interrupting or speaking over a caller, how long he put the caller on hold, and how quickly he resolved the issue. Bajala said he nudges customers toward high-scoring responses: “yes,” “perfect,” “great.” Every stutter, pause, mispronounced word, or deviation from a script earns him a demerit. The program grades Bajala, and, though his base pay remains fixed, continually underperforming could mean probation, no incentives, or even termination, he said. “AI is supposed to make our lives easier, but I just see it as my boss,” he said.

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