future of work

Earning up to $60 per hour, Jay was an early recruit, joining Remotasks the month before OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the world. Since then, the platform has been accelerating its search for expert data laborers. In January 2024, WIRED found, the company published job ads seeking speakers of more than 20 different European languages, as well as US-based creative writers, sports journalists, chemistry experts, and nuclear physicists.“Left to their own devices, generative AI can be prone to hallucination, and even if it's…

(ChatGPT via David Nield)When you've decided on the types of jobs you want, a chatbot can help you understand anything from finding out what a typical day looks like, to the sorts of skills you'll use, or it can help you learn about the specific company you're applying to.Of course, chatbots don't know any of this, but they can make smart assumptions based on the masses of text they've been trained on and information from the web. It's always worth double-checking key points, especially when it comes to the details of a…

Michael Arendt has spent his career on the water. After working his way up through the US Merchant Marines from deckhand to riverboat captain, he came ashore in 2001 to work as a lock and dam operator for the US Army Corps of Engineers. He now guides boats hauling anything from rocks to missiles through Alabama’s Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway, which connects Tennessee and Alabama to the Gulf of Mexico.Arendt enjoys the work and sees lock and dam operators as a crucial part of US transportation infrastructure and national…

According to Mark Zuckerberg, the "metaverse"—which the Meta founder describes as "an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it"—will radically change our lives. So far, Meta's main metaverse product is a virtual reality playground called Horizon Worlds. When Zuckerberg announced his company's metaverse push in October 2021, the prevailing sentiment was that it was something nobody had asked for, nor particularly wanted. Many of us wondered what people would actually do in this new online…

As companies increasingly involve AI in their hiring processes, advocates, lawyers, and researchers have continued to sound the alarm. Algorithms have been found to automatically assign job candidates different scores based on arbitrary criteria like whether they wear glasses or a headscarf or have a bookshelf in the background. Hiring algorithms can penalize applicants for having a Black-sounding name, mentioning a women’s college, and even submitting their résumé using certain file types. They can disadvantage people…