Tamay Besiroglu, founder of the artificial intelligence research organization Epoch, created a startup called Mechanize, which aims to «fully automate all work» and «fully automate the economy». He believes that if AI agents take all jobs, it will actually make people richer.
Tamay Besiroglu, founder of the artificial intelligence research organization Epoch, created a startup called Mechanize, which aims to «fully automate all work» and «fully automate the economy». He believes that if AI agents take all jobs, it will actually make people richer.
As TechCrunch notes, Mechanize is essentially working to replace every worker with an AI bot agent. The startup wants to provide data, assessments, and a digital environment to enable automation of any job.
Tamay Besiroglu even calculated the total market for Mechanize, aggregating all the salaries people currently earn. «The market potential here is absurdly large: US workers are paid about $18 trillion per year in total. For the entire world, that figure is three times that — about $60 trillion per year», — he wrote.
He later clarified that Mechanize focuses on automating white-collar jobs, not manual labor that requires robotics. But the startup’s announcement was still met with criticism.
«Huge respect for the work of the Epoch founders, but it’s sad to see this. Automating most of the human work is a truly gigantic prize for companies, which is why many of the largest companies on Earth are already striving for it. I think this will be a huge loss for most people,» one user X (Twitter) responded.
The Epoch AI Research Institute, which Besiroglu leads, analyzes the economic impact of AI and develops AI performance criteria, which are considered an unbiased way to verify the performance claims made by manufacturers of advanced AI models.
However, in December, Epoch revealed that OpenAI had supported the creation of one of its AI benchmarks, which ChatGPT authors then used to present their new o3 model. Social media users noted that Epoch should have been more explicit about this partnership.
Tamay Besiroglu convinces skeptics that letting AI agents do all the work will actually make people richer, not poorer, through «explosive economic growth.»
«Full automation of labor could lead to enormous prosperity, a much higher standard of living, and new goods and services that we cannot even imagine today,» the startup founder claims.
This may be true for those who own the agents if employers pay for them instead of developing their own agents. On the other hand, if people are unemployed, they will not have the income to buy everything that AI agents produce.
According to Besiroglu, people’s salaries in such an AI-automated world should increase because such workers are «more valuable in additional roles that AI cannot perform.»
«Even in scenarios where wages may decline, economic well-being is not determined solely by wages. People usually receive income from other sources, such as rent, dividends, and government assistance,» says Tamay Besiroglu.
So maybe we all make a living in stocks or real estate. If not, there’s always welfare—if AI agents pay taxes.
While Besiroglu’s vision and mission are clearly extreme, the technical problem he’s trying to solve is legitimate. If every worker had a personal team of agents to help them get more work done, it could lead to economic prosperity. And Besiroglu is undoubtedly right about at least one thing: a year from now, in the age of AI agents, they won’t work.
Some agree with his vision — if every worker had a personal team of agents to help them produce more work, it could lead to economic growth.
Besiroglu is also definitely right about at least one thing: a year after the AI agents first appeared, they’re not working very well. He notes that they’re unreliable, don’t retain information, try to do things on their own, «and can’t execute long-term plans without getting off track». Perhaps that’s why Mechanize is hiring.
Let us remind you that while Tamay Besiroglu dreams of giving all his work to AI, the Ministry of Economy plans to actively use artificial intelligence to search for vacancies for unemployed Ukrainians.
