BBC Audio | The interface | Does AI use your knowledge at a reasonable price?

AI is coming for your job – but not in the way you think.

Karen says the real shock isn’t a mass replacement (yet). It is 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 there is a growth in the skilled workforce. AI companies are recruiting graduates and specialists to teach models the expertise they cannot yet provide reliably. That’s the unpleasant irony of “PhD-ready” AI: to get there, it needs real PhDs (and near-PhDs) to apply its 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 through a meter.” Meanwhile, the job market for college graduates is shrinking rapidly. Is this the “Uberization” of knowledge work—stable careers, divided into jobs, paid by the piece, constantly monitored—with workers training the systems that may later deskill or replace them?

Nicky…