TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup “whose founder — and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch — is being skewered on X…”
Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup’s goal, Besiroglu wrote, is “the full automation of all work” and “the full automation of the economy.”
Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize’s total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid. “The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year,” he wrote.
Besiroglu did, however, clarify to TechCrunch that “our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work” rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics…
Besiroglu argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually enrich humans, not impoverish them, through “explosive economic growth.” He points to a paper he published on the topic. “Completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can’t even imagine today,” he told TechCrunch.
TechCrunch wonders how jobless humans will produce goods — and whether wealth will simply concentrate around whoever owns the agents.
But they do concede that Besiroglu may be right that “If each human worker has a personal crew of agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could follow…”
