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Behind the Curtain: A White-Collar Bloodbath
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
Behind the Curtain: A White-Collar Bloodbath
I'm a little less excitable than I was back in the day, and a lot of that is attributable to this newsletter. But, allow me to share this alarmist but worth-reading article suggesting that AI is coming for people's jobs, and nobody is really talking about it.
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world's most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us: AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.
Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop "sugar-coating" what's coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.
Here's how Amodei and others fear the white-collar bloodbath is unfolding:
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and other large AI companies keep vastly improving the capabilities of their large language models (LLMs) to meet and beat human performance with more and more tasks. This is happening and accelerating.
The U.S. government, worried about losing ground to China or spooking workers with preemptive warnings, says little. The administration and Congress neither regulate AI nor caution the American public. This is happening and showing no signs of changing.
Most Americans, unaware of the growing power of AI and its threat to their jobs, pay little attention. This is happening, too.
And then, almost overnight, business leaders see the savings of replacing humans with AI — and do this en masse. They stop opening up new jobs, stop backfilling existing ones, and then replace human workers with agents or related automated alternatives.
The public only realizes it when it's too late.
We Made a Film With AI. You’ll Be Blown Away—and Freaked Out.
We tried to direct an AI film with Veo and Runway. The tools are magic. The process is madness.
Welcome to the premiere of “My Robot & Me.” Please silence your phones, chew your popcorn quietly and remember: Every visual you’re about to see was generated with AI. Most of the audio too, except my voice.
Some of it’s totally wild. You won’t believe that no real cameras were used. Some of it, you’ll laugh at, because it’s clearly not real. I promise you, I did not have facial reconstructive surgery between scenes.
But enough from me. Hopefully by now you’ve watched the film above, complete with its behind-the-scenes look. Just come back—we’ve got some lessons to share.
Over a thousand clips, days of work and who knows how much data-center computing power later, we ended up with a three-minute film—about my life with a new kind of efficiency robot. Even if you don’t care about camera angles or storyboards, you might care about what this says about using AI in any job.
The New Dream Job for Young Men: Stay-at-Home Son
‘Jeopardy’ champion Brendan Liaw is unemployed, lives with his parents and won almost $60,000 …
You’ve mocked them as mooches and mom’s basement dwellers. They prefer the term “stay-at-home sons,” and have a new hero in “Jeopardy” champion Brendan Liaw.
Liaw, 27, has a master’s degree in political science and, judging by his quiz-show performances, an expansive knowledge of everything from the Middle Ages to pop music. He won $59,398 in three contests that aired last week.
He is also unemployed and lives with his parents. At his request, “Jeopardy” host Ken Jennings introduced him at the beginning of each episode as a “recent graduate and stay-at-home son.”
“I figured even if I lost my first game, at least I could make people laugh,” he says.
It worked. Liaw’s self-deprecating humor made him an overnight legend on social media, where people say he is, like, pretty much living their dream, lol.
I asked Liaw about his career prospects, trivia skills and living arrangement after his run on “Jeopardy.”
The Spy Factory
Russia’s intelligence services turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives. A team of federal agents from the South American country has been quietly dismantling it.
Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He ran a successful 3-D printing business and shared an upscale apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend and a fluffy orange-and-white Maine coon cat.
But most important, he had an authentic birth certificate and passport that cemented his alias as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, a 34-year-old Brazilian citizen.
After six years lying low, he was impatient to begin real spy work.
“No one wants to feel loser,” he wrote in a 2021 text message to his Russian wife, who was also an intelligence officer, using imperfect English. “That is why I continue working and hoping.”
He was not alone. For years, a New York Times investigation found, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, known as illegals. In an audacious and far-reaching operation, the spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs — events that, over many years, became the building blocks of entirely new identities.
North Korea Infiltrates U.S. Remote Jobs—With the Help of Everyday Americans
A LinkedIn message drew a former waitress in Minnesota into a type of intricate scam involving illegal paychecks and stolen data.
The North Koreans start by sending out thousands of requests to people on job-related sites such as LinkedIn, Upwork and Fiver, investigators say. Their wide net often catches people in a time of financial need—people like Christina Chapman, who got the LinkedIn message in March 2020.
Chapman, a former waitress and massage therapist then living in a small town north of Minneapolis, had finished a coding boot camp around that time, hoping to become a web developer. It wasn’t working out.
“I live in a travel trailer. I don’t have running water; I don’t have a working bathroom. And now I don’t have heat,” she posted on TikTok. “I’m really scared. I don’t know what to do.”
Court documents say Chapman began working with the North Koreans by around October 2020 and her involvement steadily grew. By January 2023, she had moved to Arizona and was earning enough income to move into a four-bedroom home that she shared with a roommate in Phoenix, with a yard for her chihuahuas, including Henry, Serenity and Bearito.
On Oct. 27, 2023, the FBI raided Chapman’s laptop farm and found more than 90 computers.
Her secret hustle was over. In December, she was nearly out of money. She was facing serious federal charges, but she glossed things over for her “lovelies,” the name she gave her followers on TikTok.
“I lost my job at the end of October and didn’t get paid for that last month,” she said. “Even though I have been applying to at least three to four jobs every day, I haven’t found anything yet.”
The FBI says the scam more broadly involves thousands of North Korean workers and brings hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the country. “That’s a material percentage of their economy,” said Gregory Austin, a section chief with the FBI.
Manufacturing is Thriving in the South. Here’s Why Neither Party Can Admit It
Both parties are afraid to confront the real story behind manufacturing losses.
There’s a popular story that politicians in both parties like to tell us: The Rust Belt was a thriving region until China, Mexico and their American business allies tore their manufacturing jobs away with lopsided trade deals. Whether through President Donald Trump’s tariffs or some Democratic alternative, it’s now up to Washington to get them back.
It’s a politically convenient tale for courting voters in key swing states, pining for the way things once were. The problem is that it’s not true — and it is leading to some terrible policy decisions.
A big missing part of the story: Interstate competition.
The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.
In 1992, there was not a single auto plant in Alabama. Today, Alabama is the No. 1 auto-exporting state, producing more than 1 million vehicles a year. That’s brought more than 50,000 jobs and billions of dollars in investment. Instead of a Big Three, it has a Big Five (Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Mazda) along with an ever-expanding web of suppliers. This is just one example of the South’s burgeoning economic prowess.
What’s Best for My Pain: Tylenol or Advil?
Different classes of pain relievers work in different ways. Here’s how to figure out the ideal one for you.
When you have various aches and pains, it can be challenging to decide which over-the-counter pain reliever is best matched for your affliction — Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, Motrin?
The choice, experts say, really comes down to just two classes of medication: acetaminophen and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (or NSAIDs).
Each addresses pain in its own way, said Mary Lynn McPherson, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. And not all types of pain respond equally well to both, she added.
Here’s how to tell what types of pain these drugs are most effective at relieving, and how to use them safely.
I don’t know if it’s the current culture or what but I couldn’t wait to leave home & not because it wasn’t great, it was just time.
As an administrative support specialist for 40 years, I am sure the jobs I had will soon be taken over by AI. It can create documents, set appointments, book travel. But the one thing AI cannot be is a sounding board; some things just need a human touch.
The film was interesting. Didn’t understand a lot of the technology, but I m sure it will change how some films are made.
The 27 year old man still living at home with a master’s degree made me kind of ragey. His parents are doing him no favours, and he is wasting a lot of education to be a social media footprint. I certainly hope his parents are charging him rent and that him mom is not doing his laundry or cleaning or making all his meals. Time for Junior to grow up and be a real adult.
The Korean scam is rather ingenious, but I have to wonder why the people in the States didn’t start to wonder what was going on when they got the 20th computer . . . But I guess having a steady source of income can be a game changer.