AI Startup Mechanize Aims To Replace All Professional Roles

The AI startup Mechanize has stated a controversial goal: to automate all professional roles, starting from software developers, through to teachers, and extending to lawyers and caregivers.

“Our goal is to fully automate work,” said co-founder Tamay Besiroglu, 29. “We want to get to a fully automated economy, and make that happen as fast as possible,” as reported in an interview with The New York Times.

The startup Mechanize emerged in 2024 through the collaboration of Besiroglu, Ege Erdil, and Matthew Barnett, who previously worked at Epoch AI.

The Times reports that the startup has gained financial from Stripe’s Patrick Collison and Google’s Jeff Dean, among other prominent tech industry leaders. The company maintains partnerships with major AI organizations but keeps their names undisclosed.

Mechanize develops training environments through reinforcement learning to teach AI systems by allowing them to learn through trial and error in digital simulations, like a digital simulation of a software engineer’s desk. “It’s effectively like creating a very boring video game,” Besiroglu said to The Times.

Mechanize believes its system can eventually handle nearly every responsibility a person does at a computer. “We’ll only truly know we’ve succeeded once we’ve created A.I. systems capable of taking on nearly every responsibility a human could carry out at a computer,” the company wrote in a blog post.

But critics and experts raise ethical concerns. What happens to workers? Will society be ready for mass job loss?

Barnett, who describes himself as a libertarian, believes the trade-off is worth it: “If society as a whole becomes much wealthier, then I think that just outweighs the downsides of people losing their jobs.”

Mechanize’s founders estimate full labor automation could take 10 to 30 years. But critics question if society is ready. Still, the company fails to present any specific strategy for ing workers who lose their jobs, except through general discussions about universal basic income.

Some critics argue that this shift poses serious risks for workers and the broader economy. According to Yanis Varoufakis, large technology platforms extract substantial “cloud serfs” from s and businesses, reducing the overall money circulating in the economy.

As Varoufakis explains in an interview with The Verge, this extraction limits investment and ultimately leads to fewer quality jobs. Small businesses and app developers, for example, must pay significant fees to dominant platforms like Apple or Amazon, which can undermine their ability to grow and compete independently.

Varoufakis explains that the system depends on unpaid content to create value for these companies, which intensifies the economic gap between platform owners and the general population.

Varoufakis argues that the economic power concentrated among digital “lords” threatens to worsen employment losses and economic turbulence, while diminishing public control over economic resources. These economic trends will likely persist without proper regulatory measures, which threaten both worker income stability and economic health.

Mechanize demonstrates Silicon Valley’s current state, where automation has transitioned from being a future concept to an active process that continues to speed up.