Will artificial intelligence (AI) ultimately replace humans in the workplace?The founder of Mechanize appears to believe this is the case. The startup, whose launch was covered in a TechCrunch report on Saturday, April 19, debuted last week with that explicit mission, sparking some controversy. “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 took this claim even further, promising the complete automation of the economy, according to its announcement on X. “We will achieve this by creating simulated environments and evaluations that capture the full scope of what people do at their jobs, ” Mechanize stated. “This includes using a computer, completing long-term tasks that lack clear success criteria, coordinating with others, and reprioritizing when faced with obstacles and interruptions. ” According to TechCrunch, Besiroglu estimated Mechanize’s total addressable market by aggregating all global human wages, which amount to approximately $60 trillion annually. However, he told the outlet that “our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work” rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics. TechCrunch noted that the reaction to the launch was “brutal, ” with one X user arguing that “automation of most human labor …will be a huge loss for most humans. ” As PYMNTS reported earlier this month, many workers are concerned about whether AI will render human workers obsolete or increase their value. Nevertheless, MIT economics professor David Autor argues that AI will mostly augment workers instead of replacing 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 referred to 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 remain anxious. Research by PYMNTS Intelligence — from the report “GenAI: A Generational Look at AI Usage and Attitudes” — reveals that 54% of respondents believe AI presents a “significant risk” of widespread job displacement. These worries affect various industries and demographics, though some groups are more concerned than others. Workers in the technology sector and in non-customer-facing roles expressed the highest concern (58%), while those in healthcare and education were less worried, at 48% and 52%, respectively.