There’s no doubt we are witnessing a quiet shift in labor: artificial intelligence is no longer confined to experimental labs or consumer chatbots, it is now eroding the foundation of human labor in ways that are less visible, but potentially more consequential, than the headlines about “AI assistants” or “superintelligence.”

Last week, Google abruptly terminated 200 AI contractors, many of them involved in annotation and evaluation work. Officially, the company described this as part of a ramp-down, but workers pointed mainly to low pay and job insecurity. What matters is that the roles being cut are precisely those that ensure human oversight of AI systems: the raters, annotators, and evaluators who form the invisible scaffolding of “smart” or “intelligent” products.

In parallel, at an

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