Duolingo announced this week to replace entrepreneurs with AI and become a “IA -ST” company – a decision that Journalist Brian Merchant underlined As a sign that the AI job crisis “is there now”.
In fact, Mercihant spoke to a former Duolingo entrepreneur who said it was not even a new policy. The company reduced around 10% of its entrepreneurial employees at the end of 2023, and Mercihant said that there had been another series of cuts in October 2024. In both cases, entrepreneurs (first translators, then writers) were replaced by AI.
The merchant also noted reports in the Atlantic around Unusually high unemployment rate for recent university graduates. An explanation? Businesses could replace the JOGs at entry -level collar with AI, or their IA expenses could simply “eliminate” spending on new hires.
This crisis, wrote Mercihant, is really “a series of management decisions taken by leaders seeking to reduce labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations”, and it manifests itself as “attrition in the creative industries, the decline in income from independent artists, writers and illustrators, and in companies” inclining to simply hire less human workers “.
“The AI job crisis is not a kind of use of a apocalypse skynet robot – it’s Doge drawing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of “A strategy of the IA-STIs”He added.
