If, like me, you were curious about what “disaster” is referring to, it’s basically this:
The flight attendants are told to prioritize guard orders over prisoner safety (aka keep them in chains). And they have no evacuation protocols. If the plane crashes or people need to parachute out, the prisoners will be left for dead.
Clickbait. They basically say replacing contractors with AI is business as usual for Duolingo and that the real crisis is DOGE.
Here’s the article:
Duolingo announced plans this week to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company — a move that journalist Brian Merchant pointed to as a sign that the AI jobs crisis “is here, now.”
In fact, Merchant spoke to a former Duolingo contractor who said this isn’t even a new policy. The company cut around 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023, and Merchant said there was another round of cuts in October 2024. In both cases, contractors (first translators, then writers) were replaced with AI.
Merchant also noted reporting in The Atlantic around the unusually high unemployment rate for recent college graduates. One explanation? Companies might be replacing entry-level white collar jobs with AI, or their spending on AI might simply be “crowding out” the spending for new hires.
This crisis, Merchant wrote, is really “a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations,” and it’s manifesting as “attrition in creative industries, the declining income of freelance artists, writers, and illustrators, and in corporations’ inclination to simply hire fewer human workers.”
“The AI jobs crisis is not any sort of SkyNet-esque robot jobs apocalypse — it’s DOGE firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of ‘an AI-first strategy,’” he added.
I remember a Freakonomics episode that described an experimental alternative to traffic cops: a “good driver” lottery.
If you’re “caught” driving the speed limit, you get entered into a lottery. Less adversarial relationship with traffic cops and more drivers would be incentivized to drive safe more often.
Edit: It was apparently an article, not a podcast.
I see a lot of well-meaning support for this. I can’t help but think there has to be a way to implement these kinds of controls without taking power away from the user.
Like the Fediverse implementing better mod tools rather than expecting Twitter to effectively moderate the internet.
A beta build of Android 16 contains an early version of Google’s new Android Desktop Mode that, in the future, could let users simply plug their smartphone into a monitor and use it like a laptop or desktop computer.
I think the purpose of a parachute is so that it can be used in an emergency, yes.