A new start-up in San Francisco, Mechanize, is working on artificial intelligence tools to automate white-collar jobs as fast as possible. The company’s founders believe that technology capable of mass labor automation is near and aim to fully automate work within the next 10 to 20 years.
Led by Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil, and Matthew Barnett, Mechanize has attracted investments from tech leaders including Patrick Collison and Jeff Dean. The company’s approach focuses on reinforcement learning, a method used to train A.I. systems to play complex games like Go at a superhuman level.
Mechanize aims to automate software engineering by creating training environments that mimic real-world tasks. The system is asked to accomplish a task using tools like an email inbox and coding software. If it succeeds, it receives a reward; if it fails, it gets a penalty. This process repeats until the A.I. learns to perform the task as a human engineer.
The company’s goal is to make full automation possible, but its approach has raised concerns about empathy for those whose jobs will be replaced and the readiness of society for such change. The founders propose a universal basic income to help laid-off workers maintain a high living standard, but their plan lacks novel policy proposals to address the transition.
Mechanize’s CEO, Tamay Besiroglu, believes that A.I. will accelerate economic growth and spur lifesaving breakthroughs in medicine and science. However, critics argue that automation should prioritize social responsibility over profit. The company’s stance on this issue has sparked debate about the ethics of automating all labor.
While Mechanize is being candid about its goals, it remains unclear whether their approach will be successful, particularly for non-technical jobs where success and failure are harder to measure.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/technology/ai-mechanize-jobs.html