Two new reports point to a growing unease about how artificial intelligence is reshaping work — both for the people applying for jobs and the people already in them.
According to MIT Technology Review, the next time you apply for a job, an AI system may screen your résumé before any human ever looks at it. And that automation carries a catch: the outlet reports that AI is actually more likely than humans to form biases when making hiring decisions. In other words, handing the first cut to a machine doesn't necessarily strip prejudice out of the process — it may amplify it.
Meanwhile, the fears of workers already inside the industry are more concrete than the usual "robots are coming for my job" narrative. According to ZDNet, a survey of 6,000 tech professionals found that their top AI-related worry isn't unemployment at all. It's the prospect of doing more work for the same pay — AI raising expectations and output without a matching rise in compensation.
The survey surfaced a striking measure of that discontent: ZDNet reports that most tech professionals would not recommend their own role to someone entering the industry today. For a sector long seen as a reliable ladder to good pay and job security, that's a notable vote of no confidence.
Taken together, the two stories sketch AI's double squeeze on labor. On the way into a job, applicants face automated gatekeepers that may judge them less fairly than a person would. Once inside, workers worry the same technology will quietly ratchet up their workload rather than lift their earnings.
Why it matters: as AI moves from novelty to default across hiring and daily work, these findings suggest the technology's biggest near-term impact may be less about eliminating jobs than about making them harder to get fairly and less rewarding to keep.