Mechanize, a brand new startup that made its debut last week with the equally ambitious goal of automating the entire economy. From its tech-backed launch, documented in an enthusiastic TechCrunch article, the company has generated as much excitement as it has outrage. According to founder Tamay Besiroglu, AI is key to making human workers more valuable, by transitioning them away from undesirable unskilled labor.

Besiroglu posted on X about the company’s launch, claiming to fully automate the global economy. Mechanize’s mission is to free people from the grind of drudgery.

Mechanize will build virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data to enable the full automation of all work. - Tamay Besiroglu

The artificial intelligence-oriented company expects to do this with virtual work environments, performance benchmarks, and training data pipelines. Yet the company’s short-term priorities very much lie with white-collar labor.

our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work. - Tamay Besiroglu

The reception to the launch has been a bit sour. Many view the replacement of human workers with machines as a new negative development. They call it “brutal” and they consider it a “big loss” for the rest of humanity. Others are optimistic.

As economist David Autor argues, rather than replacing humans, machines should be used to augment human effectiveness.

There are two competing visions of AI. One is machines make us irrelevant. Another is machines make us more useful. I think the latter has a lot to recommend it. - Autor

Autor refers to this historical trend of automation creating a labor stock that has become more valuable.

Over the last 200 years, we have automated so much of what we do. We have mechanized. We have moved ourselves out of agriculture, out of manufacturing, out of back-breaking toil. - Autor

We have made labor more valuable during that period. - Autor

Tamay Besiroglu decided that the total addressable market for Mechanize extends to a whopping $60 trillion per year. He calculated this number by taking the total global wages we pay humans. The company plans to address complex tasks.

This includes using a computer, completing long-horizon tasks that lack clear criteria for success, coordinating with others, and reprioritizing in the face of obstacles and interruptions. - Mechanize