Labor

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LaborBoth readings

Emotional AI and the rise of pseudo-intimacy: are we trading authenticity for algorithmic affection?

Introduction In recent years, artificial intelligence has moved beyond the realm of data analysis, automation, and task efficiency to enter the domain of human emotion. What was once a domain exclusively reserved for living beings—empathy, intimacy, and affection—is now being approximated by lines of code. Emotional AI systems are emerging in various forms: companion chatbots, virtual friends, therapeutic apps, and sentiment-aware assistants (Guingrich and Graziano, 2023; Chu et al., 2025). These technologies ar…

Frontiers in Psychology

Both readings

Can you futureproof your career by choosing an AI-resistant degree?

Evidence-backed problem

AI may be denting computer science graduates’ job prospects, UK data shows

Evidence-backed gain

‘Immature playground boasting’: Mathematicians uneasy at OpenAI’s latest scalp

Evidence-backed problem

Occupational Vulnerability to AI-Driven Change: The Role of Skill Composition, Task Structure, and Psychosocial Buffers

Background Automation risk is often framed as a question of which jobs can be automated. This perspective neglects how the structure of work itself shapes workers' vulnerability to AI-driven change. In occupational health research, job characteristics such as autonomy, task variety, and social interaction are known to influence worker well-being, yet are rarely incorporated into assessments of AI-related occupational risk. Methods To capture this complex vulnerability, this study distinguishes between Automation…

Evidence-backed problem

Unmasking bias in the evidence ecosystem: a panoramic analysis of 311,751 meta-analyses using an artificial intelligence agent-based approach

Traditional secondary meta-analysis workflows are highly labour-intensive, time-consuming, and difficult to update in real time. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive artificial intelligence frameworks capable of automating the entire meta-analysis workflow, including literature screening, data extraction, and quality assessment. Furthermore, a large-scale structured database for systematically analysing the global landscape of published meta-analyses remains unavailable. In this viewpoint, we aimed to eva…

Evidence-backed problem

Women Are 26% Of AI Hires. That's A Design Flaw, Not A Shortage

New LinkedIn data shows women are just 26% of AI hires. The gender gap in AI is a design flaw, and almost no one's compensation depends on fixing it.

Evidence-backed gain

Technology-Enabled Interventions for Preventing and Responding to Elder Abuse: A Review of the Current Evidence

This scoping review consolidates existing technology-enabled interventions for preventing and responding to abuse of older people (AOP). Studies reporting original, evaluated interventions in which technology delivered over 50% of the content or enabled coordination were included. Ten primary databases, four gray literature sources, and two artificial intelligence‑assisted platforms were searched for articles published between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2024. Two reviewers independently assessed study qual…

Labor

Moral distress risk profiling in ICU nurses: A cross-sectional study

BackgroundMoral distress is common among ICU nurses and has been linked to burnout, diminished care quality, and turnover. Which factors matter most - and how they combine to shape individual risk - remains poorly characterised.Research objectiveTo identify factors associated with moral distress in ICU nurses and develop a parsimonious, exploratory risk-profiling model.Research designMulticentre cross-sectional survey with machine learning analysis.Participants and research contextA total of 318 registered nurse…

Labor

Lost jobs, inequality, rogue agents: why are we accepting oligarchs’ AI agenda? | Robert Reich

Rather than producing jobs, the US economy actually lost 23,000 jobs in July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released on Friday. In addition, May and June’s job numbers were revised downward, showing a combined 103,000 fewer jobs than previously reported. As if this weren’t bad enough, wage growth has also slowed. Average hourly earnings rose by just 0.1% from June. This isn’t just a single month’s slow wage growth, either. Average hourly earnings increased just 3.2% over the past year – the lowest…

Labor

AI was supposed to destroy jobs. Where’s the carnage?

The prediction was stark: artificial intelligence advancements would wipe out jobs en masse. “Half” of all entry-level white collar jobs would vanish, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said in May 2025. A month later, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, went further, foreseeing the end of “certain job categories”. Companies began citing AI in their layoffs. Workers organized. And students reconsidered their future careers. But a year later, the mass carnage hasn’t shown up. Even as AI capabilities have rapidly advanced and A…

Labor

UK ad agencies undergo their biggest exodus of staff as AI threatens industry

UK advertising agencies had their biggest annual exodus of staff last year, led by younger workers, as artificial intelligence tools threaten to replace workers and force the industry to cut jobs and costs. Staff numbers at creative agencies, which are facing acute pressure from the rollout of AI tools that reduce or even replace the need for agency staff, fell more than 14% in 2025. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), which has been reporting on staffing in the UK ad industry since 1959, said i…

Labor

What If We Got AI Right? by Eleanor Drage review – avoiding apocalypse

The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some mystical, formless thing, it is the product of hours of human labour, in silicon and quartz mines, microchip factories and data labelling centres. If citizens want to wrest power from the tech companies that are building AI, it helps to understand clearly what they are selling us. This also means seeing through the mark…

Labor

The AI jobs apocalypse probably isn’t coming anytime soon

In March, Anthropic, the cutting-edge artificial intelligence business that gave us the chatbot Claude, published an analysis on the impact of AI on employment, to help us assess the claim that intelligent robots were about to redefine human existence, ending demand for human labor. Last year in May, Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, claimed AI could wipe out half of all entry-level jobs in one to five years. Last January, he told us AI would probably become a “general labor substitute for humans”. In June h…

Labor

‘Customers prefer AI chatbots,’ says British Gas owner as 1,300 call centre jobs axed

The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres. Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cuts it confirmed last month. The plan to reduce the supplier’s customer service teams in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Leicester, Stockport and Leeds by 14% is expected to take place ov…