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.'...

A willingness to pivot early and often can set the stage for corporate achievement. George Feldenkreis was poor when he fled Cuba for the United States, bringing only $700 with him. Initially, he sold automotive parts, but a pivot to selling the guayabera shirt'a cultural symbol of Cuba'marked his foray into fashion. Feldenkreis went on to become chair of Perry Ellis International, which acquired more than 30 clothing labels and became a billion-dollar empire. As a woman rising up the corporate ranks in the 1960s, Carol Goldberg, Stop & Shop's former president, navigated uncharted territory. Rather than subscribe to societal norms, she challenged them. Goldberg was only the second woman to graduate from Harvard Business School's advanced management program and the first to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She also coauthored a book to help women executives succeed. Ulysses 'Junior' Bridgeman wrote the next chapter of his own life story and, through a series of pivots, went from National Basketball Association (NBA) player to part NBA owner. In the 30-plus years between playing for the Bucks and owning a 10 percent stake in his former team, the player-turned-billionaire owned more than 500 franchises....

Stock markets plunged for days after President Donald Trump announced steep tariffs on imports from around the world. The sell-off ebbed only when he suspended most, but not all, of the new measures for 90 days. The ticker tape is just one indicator of an economy, and other signs are growing more and more ominous'including at the Port of Los Angeles, where high tariffs on China are crushing maritime traffic. 'Essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased,' Eugene Seroka, the executive director of the port, said on April 24. Trump views tariffs as essential to rebuilding the manufacturing economy that the United States once had. But his erratic tariff announcements have badly disrupted the economy that the country has today, and that pain is already being felt in the world of logistics. 'These are big, massive bullwhips that have not been seen since COVID,' Evan Smith, the CEO of the supply-chain-management company Altana Technologies, told me. 'The tariffs themselves are a shock to the system, and the shock is echoed and amplified across the entire chain. Even if there is resolution, it will take nine to 12 months to work out these bumps.'...

A young entrepreneur who was among the earliest known recruiters for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has a new, related gig'and he's hiring. Anthony Jancso, cofounder of AccelerateX, a government tech startup, is looking for technologists to work on a project that aims to have artificial intelligence perform tasks that are currently the responsibility of tens of thousands of federal workers. Jancso, a former Palantir employee, wrote in a Slack with about 2000 Palantir alumni in it that he's hiring for a 'DOGE orthogonal project to design benchmarks and deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies,' according to an April 21 post reviewed by WIRED. Agents are programs that can perform work autonomously. 'We've identified over 300 roles with almost full-process standardization, freeing up at least 70k FTEs for higher-impact work over the next year,' he continued, essentially claiming that tens of thousands of federal employees could see many aspects of their job automated and replaced by these AI agents. Workers for the project, he wrote, would be based on site in Washington, DC, and would not require a security clearance; it isn't clear for whom they would work. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment....