Startup Investors Foaming at the Mouth To Carve Up Your Job With AI

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" tur ... Read full article.