B rendan Foody is 22 years old and runs a company worth billions. This August, I met the young CEO in a glass conference room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. While his peers are searching for their first jobs, Foody is pursuing a " master plan," as he calls it, to upend the global labor market. His start-up, Mercor, offers an AI-powered hiring platform: Bots weed through résumés, and even conduct interviews. In the next five years, Foody told me, AI could automate 50 percent of the tasks that people do today.

RadVid-19, a program which identifies lung injuries through artificial intelligence, is used at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. RadVid-19, a program which identifies lung injuries through artificial intelligence, is used at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. The tasks resemble those that lawyers, doctors, financial analysts, and management consultants solve for a living. One asks for a diagnosis of a six-year-old patient based on nine pieces of multimedia evidence; another asks for legal advice on a musician's estate; a third calls for a valuation of part of a healthcare technology company. Mercor, which claims to supply "expert data" to every top AI company, says that it spent more than $500,000 to develop 200 tasks that test whether AIs can perform knowledge work with high economic value across law, medicine, finance, and management consulting.