THE PREEMPTIVE PIVOT

While there’s no evidence linking AI to mass layoffs, the tech has already ‘changed worker psychology’.

When artificial intelligence researcher Mrinank Sharma quit his job at Anthropic earlier this year, the news rippled across the internet. In his resignation letter, posted on X and viewed 15.3m times, Sharma warned of a world “in peril” from the technology he had helped build.

“It is clear to me the time has come to move on,” he wrote. His next move: a poetry degree.

In the months following Sharma’s resignation, AI industry defectors and workers outside of Silicon Valley alike have echoed his sentiments.

Bracing for disruption forecasted by the AI industry, white-collar professionals are voluntarily leaving established careers to pursue professions they feel are more secure or more aligned with their values. Workers across industries – from tech to public relations to consulting – say AI changed the substance and stability of their jobs overnight. They worry about AI jeopardizing their cognitive abilities, contributing to climate change, undermining value to customers and compromising security. Some, like Sharma, have left their fields entirely, shifting to vastly different careers.

The shift on the ground

Some white-collar workers have begun to look beyond the dreams they were sold as AI reshapes jobs.

After spending nearly a decade in public relations, 30-year-old Vanessa Hsia decided to seek a master’s degree in comparative literature.

“I felt very burnt out and concerned with the direction of the industry: chasing quantity over quality, relying on AI rather than critical thinking, prioritizing short-term wins over long-term strategy,” Hsia posted on LinkedIn. “I have no idea where this path will lead, but I’m taking my own advice: the world is on fire, might as well do what you want.”

Hsia and her former colleagues in PR feared AI would eventually replace them, she said, noting that specific tasks like pitching reporters over email were already being automated.

“I’ve been sold this dream that if I work really hard in my career, I’ll climb the ladder, that I will be respected in my field and paid a fair wage,” she said. “But then you have this technology that exacerbates the fact that, actually, no, that’s not guaranteed.”

- Author: Amelia Penniman, The Guardian

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CHINA'S NEW GRADUATES FACING A DIRE JOB MARKET

A record 12.7 million young people are looking for jobs as the country embraces artificial intelligence — and as the technology begins to upend the work force.

A few months out from graduating with a master’s degree in urban planning, Jin Shangyu is watching artificial intelligence upend the industry she is trying to enter.

Job boards are filled with roles that require A.I. expertise, while listings for traditional roles seem to be dwindling. Much of the work involved in the early stage of a design project, which used to involve several people, can now be executed with a few clicks of a mouse.

Since getting her degree from the University of Hong Kong, Ms. Jin, 26, who is from northern China, has applied for about 150 internships and entry-level jobs in Hong Kong and mainland China, but has been met with silence. She took a $400 professional A.I. course in hopes of standing out in the marketplace. It does not seem to have helped. No wonder, she thought: If even seasoned workers are being undercut by A.I., what chance was there for those seeking to enter the work force?

“My feeling is that we, new graduates, are exactly the kind of people that A.I. will replace,” she said. When she thinks about planning for her future, she said, “I really don’t know how to even begin because I don’t see hope.”

An estimated 12.7 million new graduates are joining China’s work force this year, the largest yet of a cohort that has been steadily growing over the years. They are facing two intractable and connected challenges. Like previous classes, they are entering an oversaturated job market and competing for a shrinking pool of entry-level positions in a sluggish economy. But they also face a new obstacle in the added uncertainty of A.I., which is beginning to restructure industries and change recruiters’ priorities.

It is a global problem. College graduates around the world are grappling with the prospect that entry-level jobs could simply disappear. But in China, the concern is acute. The country has adopted A.I. at an almost unmatched pace, spurred by government support and broad public enthusiasm, while youth unemployment remains stubbornly high.

This July, the rate for urban residents aged 16 to 24 was 17.9 percent. The supply of desirable, well-paying graduate jobs has not kept pace with the ballooning number of young people who entered college.

“A.I. has arrived at a particularly difficult moment, though it did not create the underlying problem,” said Christian Yao, a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand who has studied how young Chinese people are navigating the job market.

- Author: Yan Zhuang, The New York Times

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'' PHILOSOPHERS -MIND- CONSCIOUSNESS " : A.I. MASTER ESSAY

FOR ETHICISTS in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

'' When you look at A.I. and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,'' said Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher, who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team.

'' They're almost everywhere.''

WHEN Google DeepMind announced in April that it was hiring someone whose actual business-card title would be '' Philosopher, '' the memes really flowed.

'' It's so the A.I. can learn what it feels like to have a college degree and still be unemployed,'' someone posted on X. Of philosophy majors' job precarity, a Redditor contributed :

'' Half are pulling espresso shots while silently debating whether the customer who ordered oat milk truly exists.''

But Mr. Robert Long's trajectory and Google's new hire were in line with a quietly building trend : A.I. labs, and the related nonprofit organisations around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning.

While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetise as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U. observes :

'' I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It's an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.''

One of humanity's oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other.

A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with truth, belief and knowledge [ epistemologists ], of reasoning [logicians], of mind and consciousness [ philosophers of mind and consciousness].

Thus it was that, as the sun set over San Francisco Bay on a recent Thursday, Mr. Long was on a high floor of an office tower in Berkeley discussing one of modern civilization's most intractable puzzles :

Who was the best Beatle?

This Master Essay Publishing continues to Part [2]. !WOW! thanks The New York Times.

JOB QUEUES - GENDER QUEUES : FEMALE STUDENTS ESSAY

IF, in the coming years, artificial intelligence further hollows out the white collar fields where women have made progress, it will hardly be unprecedented.

Historically, employers have often associated automation with women's work, whether in the factory or in the office.

'' Managers quickly developed the idea that competence working with machines was a feminine attribute to differentiate it from the supposedly intellectual work done by male clerks,'' Hicks write in the book '' Programmed Inequality '' about the British computing industry.

It's tempting to believe that employment in 2026 no longer resembles the blunt ranking system Reskin and Roos described, making it unnecessary for women to wait for men to lose interest before entering an occupation in large numbers.

Certainly women have made real strides in high-status fields like law and medicine.

But when you disaggregate the numbers you begin to see the familiar pattern : men holding on to the most prestigious and highest paying jobs ; a higher number of women in degraded versions of the jobs men once dominated.

[ The new wrinkle, Roos observed in a 2018 paper she wrote with a colleague, was that a number of low-paid and low-status jobs, like cooks and crossing guards, were '' masculinizing, '' and were disproportionately filled by nonwhite people and immigrants.]

The health care profession may reveal what ails us. Brian surgeons and cardiologists, who make over half a million dollars a year on average, remain overwhelmingly male, while women are now about two-thirds of pediatricians and nearly half of family doctors, both among the lowest-paid doctors.

Women are also now a majority of pharmacists - a field in which consolidation has undermined working conditions - and a majority of nurse practitioners, the fastest growing health job in America.

Nurse practitioners typically make about  $130,000 a year and perform high-status tasks like diagnosing patients and prescribing medicine.

But, as a practical matter, many patients and medical facilities rely on them as a cheaper alternative to doctors.

'' Doctors cost a lot of money and nurse practitioners don't,'' a staffing company official recently told  The Wall Street Journal. 

 This Master Prime Publishing Essay continues. !WOW! thanks Noam Scheiber.

Students Fear the Future

The mismatch has fueled what Mr. Saxena called “a terrible national psychosis”: ferocious competition for engineering degrees that once seemed to offer reliable entry into India’s technology industry. Companies such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services built enormous businesses providing information technology services to multinational companies. Now artificial intelligence is making even those jobs appear less secure.

“Borrowing heavily to pursue degrees in India is unwise,” Sridhar Vembu, a co-founder of Zoho, an Indian cloud software company, wrote on social media. “I strongly believe we should not trap young people in debt in the name of education.”

In Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi, a handful of tired and anxious undergraduates took shelter from a monsoon downpour at a cafe near the flagship campus of Amity University.

For many students, Amity is a backup when cheaper options fall through. Atul Anand had been admitted to a top public school in his native state, Bihar. But a car accident derailed his admission two years ago, he said, and he borrowed money to attend Amity instead.

He expects his degree and living expenses to cost roughly $15,000. His state government lent him $4,000 toward the bill, while his family has stretched its savings to the limit.

His father teaches math and Hindi at a village school. At night, Mr. Anand takes freelance graphic-design jobs to help cover his daily expenses.

With luck, he said, he might graduate into a technology job paying $10,000 a year.

“My dreams are not big,” he said. “I want to reduce the burden of the loan and the costs to my family.”

Against that backdrop, Mr. Anand joined the final day of last month’s protests — not as a protester, he said, but in solidarity with students who saw the gathering as a place to air grievances of every kind.

“I did not go for any political reason,” he said.

His friend Viswesh M.J. was skeptical of the protesters’ stated demands, which focused on overhauling India’s testing processes. In his view, the unrest reflected something deeper.

“The anger is a mask for your fear,” he said of the protesters. “You’re all very afraid of the future.”

Mr. Saxena knows what the other side of India’s education divide looks like. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, one of the country’s elite public universities, before joining Boston Consulting Group and helping build start-ups in Silicon Valley. Now, through Avanti Fellows, he helps deserving lower-income students prepare for the exams that can win them places at elite institutions.

The program offers free test preparation and intensive coaching. But there are far more aspiring students than places at those schools and far fewer good jobs than graduates chasing them. That leaves a vast private education industry selling families a chance at upward mobility even as the odds deteriorate.

“No one’s really going to get a job,” Mr. Saxena said. “People are going to monetize their desperation.”

- Author: Alex Travelli and Showkat Nanda, The New York Times

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India’s College Boom Is Leaving Graduates in Debt and Without Jobs

Families are betting their savings on private universities as a path to a better life. A shortage of well-paying work is turning that wager into frustration.

Knowledge Park 3, part of an education hub in northern India, was built on a promise that a college degree could lift young Indians into the middle class.

But for many of the roughly 100,000 students drawn to this cluster of private colleges and universities, two hours from central New Delhi, it delivers something else: debt and disappointment.

Families are draining their savings to attend schools that have proliferated across the area’s five Knowledge Parks over the past decade. The flood of graduates the schools are producing vastly outnumbers the availability of well-paying jobs.

Harshit Rai, 18, from the north Indian city of Varanasi, spends his days studying artificial intelligence, machine learning and anything else he thinks might help him land a job. He expects his degree from the Noida Institute of Engineering and Technology to cost $15,000, financed in part with $7,000 in bank loans. He said his goal was to earn 80,000 rupees a month, or about $10,000 a year.

He would settle for half that, he conceded, though at that salary it would take five or six years to earn back the cost of his education. A year after graduation, his loan will begin accruing interest at 10 percent annually.

“I feel some stress,” he said. “How can I repay on time?”

That anxiety is increasingly familiar among India’s young people. Last month, widespread student-led protests forced a rare capitulation from the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The public displays of outrage have subsided, but the frustration that fueled them has not.

What began as a protest about rigged exams widened into anger over the obstacles young Indians see blocking their path to a better life. The satirically named Cockroach Janta Party — an allusion to a disparaging remark made in May by India’s top judge, who compared India’s unemployed youths to “cockroaches” — became one expression of that discontent. Private universities sit squarely within the students’ dissatisfaction.

India’s working-age population, already the world’s largest at nearly one billion, grows by about 12 million people a year. For families with money to spare, education is one of the few apparent routes out of low-paid farming and wage labor. The best option is a place at one of the country’s highly competitive public universities. For those who cannot get in, private colleges offer another route.

That industry has exploded. The number of private colleges tripled in the decade after Mr. Modi became prime minister in 2014. By 2024, India had 45 million students in higher education, up 41 percent from a decade earlier, according to a government survey. More than two-thirds of all students attend private institutions.

But the expansion of higher education has far outpaced the creation of good jobs.

Nearly 40 percent of all college graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed, according to a study published by Azim Premji University. India creates only about 250,000 new jobs a year paying more than $500 a month, a benchmark for a comfortable living among the country’s top earners. Graduates of elite public universities have an enormous advantage in competing for them.

“There’s a lie that’s been sold to the young people, which is that a degree equals a job,” said Akshay Saxena, an entrepreneur and a founder of an education fellowship program.

India has roughly 550 public universities, but only about a tenth are considered elite. Fewer than 5 percent of applicants are accepted at the top institutions, where tuition averages less than $250 a year and a degree can propel graduates toward the country’s most desirable jobs.

Everyone else faces a much riskier calculation.

Mr. Saxena estimates that 400,000 students a year spend more than $20,000 on private engineering colleges, hoping for a big payoff. Median salaries for graduates are around $3,000 a year.

“The employability of the average graduate is just about 20 percent,” he said.

- Author: Alex Travelli and Showkat Nanda, The New York Times

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WOMEN'S -JOBS- WONDER : SPECIAL HISTORY ESSAY

WHEN WOMEN gain jobs - it's not entirely a triumph. The new roles they take on are often no longer wanted by men, researchers find. Secretaries were once almost all men. The job went to women when it lost upward mobility.

With the rise of the modern corporation around the turn of the 20th century, however, the secretary became more like a noncommissioned officer - a worker with real responsibility but little upward mobility.

It was at this point that the position became mostly female. Companies then broke up and degraded the job further over the decades, replacing the secretary with pools of typists, receptionists and data entry personnel, almost all of them women, too.

The final step, amid pressure from the feminist movement in the 1970s, was to allow a small number of college-educated women to ascend from these clerical jobs to the ranks of middle management.

But even this came with a loss of status, as managers would have to do more of their own grunt work. '' They're now being promoted, but the clerical tasks are promoted with them,'' said Jason Resnikoff, a labor historian.

'' The middle manager would do more typing, correspondence, more of their own filing.''  These days, almost no one has an assistant.

The workplace of the 1970s seemed to produce one feminist victory after another. At the end of the decade, just over 40 percent of women worked. By 1980, over half did. 

Newspapers and magazines heralded the development : A front page story in The New York Times announced, '' More Women Work at Traditional Male Jobs.''

But when the sociologists Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos looked carefully in their 1980 book, '' Job Queues - Gender Queues, '' they became more pessimistic.

The percentage of women in jobs as varied as bus drivers, baker, typesetter, book editor, real estate agent and public relations specialist had risen sharply. In each instance, however, employers had changed the work in a way that made it less attractive.

They leveraged pay or made it more volatile -say, by shifting from salaries to commissions.  They reduced job security, professional autonomy or opportunities for advancement.

They created inferior versions of the traditional male jobs and sought women to fill them. '' Women's numerical gains in feminizing occupations mask their ghettoization in lower paying, less prestigious occupational subspecialities, the sociologists wrote." 

This Master Essay Publishing continues in many future parts. !WOW! thanks Noam Scheiber.

Philippines AI Reckoning

'I Feel Like I Dug My Own Grave': The Workers Caught in the AI Transition.

The International Labour Organization estimates that 12.7 million Filipinos - more than one in four workers - are employed in occupations exposed to generative AI, the highest share in South East Asia.

For 15 years, single mother Lisa made a living from content writing.

She began writing straight out of college, freelanced for years and eventually followed a path taken by many young Filipinos: joining a multinational in the country's booming outsourcing industry.

Lisa says she never felt the need to use artificial intelligence (AI) in her work.

"I can say that I am able to do my job, I meet deadlines. In my opinion, there is no need for [AI]," she told the BBC.

Eight months into her latest role, and one month before the position was due to become permanent, she was made redundant.

In the months before, Lisa says a public relations agency had been tasked with producing AI-generated material that she and her colleagues were asked to edit. She says her skills were used to train the AI on the company writing style.

"I feel like I dug my own grave," she says. "We were the ones who trained the artificial intelligence that replaced us."

Lisa, not her real name, is one of several former outsourcing employees the BBC spoke to who asked to remain anonymous. They signed confidentiality agreements in return for severance pay, and fear that speaking publicly could hurt their chances of finding work in an industry which has a small network.

Their experiences offer an insight into a question confronting emerging economies like the Philippines: what happens when AI begins to automate the jobs that helped lift millions of people into the middle classes?

- Author: Suranjana Tewari, BBC

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AI Puts Skilled Electricans in Demand

A.I. Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands.

The future of artificial intelligence depends on finding more skilled humans for some very physical jobs.

As an electrician in training in Detroit, Tyler Shelton spends most of his days popping down manholes to fix cables and other electrical gear. But lately, his company has sent many of its workers to a sprawling data center that just broke ground about an hour away.

“Everybody wants that money,” Mr. Shelton, 29, said during lunch break at his apprenticeship’s twice-a-month classroom day. “We have work to do, but we’re also losing a good chunk of manpower to these data centers.”

Soon, he could join them: OpenAI’s project in Saline Township is the biggest single investment in Michigan’s history, according to the state, requiring hundreds of electricians working 10-hour days, seven days a week. Despite the overtime bonanza, Mr. Shelton has mixed feelings.

“I’d like to have a house in the next year or so,” he said. “So it’s like, I understand the draw, but I also like to have a life outside work.”

The data center boom is on everybody’s mind at the Detroit Electrical Industry Training Center, where about 850 apprentices train between long days on the job. The megaprojects are pulling skilled trade workers into remote locations with some of the highest pay and bonuses that the industry had ever seen.

The next generation of electricians is also top of mind for the artificial intelligence companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure they have enough people to build and run their data centers.

That commitment includes this training facility, which is one of 270 supported by a partnership between the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and contractors. As part of a $50 million program from Google, the group plans to boost annual apprenticeship enrollment to 30,000 from 19,500 for the next three years in locations selected by Google. Another grant from BlackRock, the asset manager, would widen training pipelines for its data centers in Texas, part of a $100 million effort to expand the skilled trades.

Tina Williams was hired to manage the grants, which are the alliance’s first from the private sector. She hopes the money strengthens the work force enough to meet demand from data centers without abandoning other clients, like Mr. Shelton’s employer.

“We want to bring in enough to fulfill the need for the data centers, while maintaining our core work in each of these locals,” she said.

- Author: Lydia DePillis, The New York Times

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DATA TRAINING DAZE : ICEBERG AHEAD! A.I. ESSAY

PROFESSIONALS are training A.I. to do their jobs. Start-ups are paying to have bots acquire increasingly rarefied skills.

EVERY DAY, MERCOR, a start up that sells training data to artificial intelligence companies, pays 30,000 contractors more than $4 million to help make their job, and those of their colleagues, obsolete.

It's gig work, but for professionals with rarefied skills. One recent Mercor posting offered $225 an hour for a voice actor able to maintain a customer service persona in fluent Hebrew.

Another sought a PhD physicist with a specialisation in general relativity, astrophysics or cosmology. A third listing wanted a physician with more than three years of experience in the Rwandan primary care medical system.

Mercor and a handful of similar startups are the primary middlemen in a supply chain of '' human data '' that may power the next generation of A.I.

As OpenAI, Anthropic and other major ventures compete to become the industry's dominant platform, the market for premium data that has been vetted by experts is exploding.

No longer do the A.I. companies need armies of low-keyed workers often overseas, to do rote tasks like tag images of cars or transcribe audio. They need mathematicians to annotate proofs, lawyers to mark up briefs and professors to grade essays. 

That's what Mercor and its rivals supply. To use the parlance of the industry, data labeling has moved up the '' value chain, '' and the start ups that offer this service have become some of the fastest growing in Silicon Valley.

Mercor, which was founded in 2023, announced a funding round last October at a $10 billion valuation, last week, Bloomberg reported that the company is now talking to investors about a deal at twice that level.

Last year, Meta invested more than $14 billion in another data training venture, Scale AI, in part to hire its chief executive.

HANDSHAKE, a recruiting start-up that pivoted to data training venture, only last year, says its annualized revenue rate crossed $1 billion in April, up from $550 million at the start of the year.

These data-traing start-ups are exploiting a market opportunity - selling to well capitalized labs a product for which there is now near-unlimited demand.

But it's a delicate moment. The training start-ups need ChatGPT, Claude, and other A.I. models released by their clients to keep improving, to demonstarte that they are adding value.

They also need the models to remain imperfect so that these clients keep coming back for more data.

This Master '' ICEBERG AHEAD '' Essay Publishing, continues. !WOW! thanks Lora Kelley.

TRENDING ONLINE TREADING : THE WORLD

.-  NOBEL Laureates among those who urge action on AI's economic impact.

OVER 200 researchers, including 15 Nobel Laureates, have called for govt and tech leaders to create policies to address the economic impact of AI.

.-  INTEL announces $5.7 billion AI-driven capital investment in Ireland.

European output to meet growing global demand for AI and high-performance computing, the chip maker said on Monday.

.-  VOLKSWAGEN CEO says 50,000 more job cuts may be needed.

Volkswagen may need to cut about 50,000 more jobs to match the competitiveness of rivals, its CEO told staff in an internal memo.

.-  EU to limit children's access to social media ' gradually.'

Children should have '' phased and gradual access '' to social media, EU chief said, as experts recommended under-13s use the web under supervision.

!WOW! thanks The Express Tribune.

STUDENTS' STANFORD STUNNERS : A.I. PUNCH ESSAY

YET the same Stanford dropouts who seem to be making the most money right now are often working on the very technology that is worsening life for their former classmates.

Emerging research has begun to show that what most people feel is obvious : Relying on A.I. for cognitive tasks can reduce one's own intellectual capacity and resilience.

It's one thing to use it in the workplace, but in the classroom, difficulty is often precisely the point. Sure, a robot can lift 600 pounds much more easily than I can - but that doesn't much help me if I'm trying to work out.

The same goes for the thinking exercise of education. However, telling that to students is about as attractive a message as '' eat your veggies '' or '' sleep eight hours.'' It feels like scolding.

STANFORD : IN APRIL 2026 - the proctored exam policy finally went into place. Because of A.I. most of us now take our tests by writing in blue books, like students a century ago, scribbling our answers by hand under keen observation.

Meanwhile, we wonder constantly what will happen next. Many students view these large language models as a job threat. The machines have gotten so much better at coding that junior engineers can't really compete.

A Stanford computer science degree means something very different today from what it did when we set foot on campus - no longer is there a functional guarantee of an entry-level position.

But for those willing to dream up a company with '' A.I. '' in the name, there is a nearly surefire route to monetary gain.

Perplexity, started right when my freshman year began, is an example of a '' wrapper '' start-up - in other words, a company that does not have its own proprietary A.I. and merely repackages existing models in a different form. It is a search tool, and loses money essentially every time a new user inputs a query. 

In April 2024, it reached a billion dollar valuation; two months later, that number tripled. In May 2025,  it announced that it was. fund-raising at a $14 billion valuation, which had grown to $18 billion by July, and $20 billion by September.

Money in Silicon Valley has become a game of almost meaningless numbers bandied about in a breathtaking casual manner. It contributes to the whirlpool effect students at Stanford have felt around tech and lucre - if your teammate can drop out and start a nine-figure company, why shouldn't you profit too?

Why put all your energy into being a student when it seems like everyone around you is getting rich?

One time during sophomore year, I was working on homework in my dorm common room with an acquaintance when she offhandedly remarked, '' I bought a house in Las Vegas last week.''  

She continued, '' It's good for taxes.'' It's hard to put your earbuds in and get right back to your problem set when someone says something like that.

This Master Essay Publishing continues. !WOW! thanks The New York Times and Theo Baker.

THE -JOB ETHICIST- TAP : CHARITY [ Q ]

IS it wrong to work for a charity that's questionably funded ? : Former colleagues of mine have recommended that I apply for a job at a philanthropic organization that does interesting work in my field.

The job description interests me, and I believe I would be a good fit for the position.

This organization's funds, however, came from someone who has made, and continues to make, their money in ways that I consider unethical.

[ There are movements to strengthen relevant laws and make such activities illegal, so I'm not the only one who thinks this. ]

While the organization is independent and is recognized for doing quality work, it feels wrong to accept money from such a source, and it feels like I would be helping to burnish the reputation of someone whose actions and public statements, both post and present, I deeply disapprove of.

It may be worth noting that I am very satisfied with my current employment status.

This position, if it were offered to me and if I accepted it, would most likely result in a small net financial gain, but it would not have a major financial impact on me or my family.

I'm finding it hard to imagine in the effort of creating an updated and relevant resume, writing a compelling cover letter, etc, given my misgivings about the funding source of the organization.

How large a role should the source of this organization's funding play in my decision to apply for a job there?

[ NAME WITHHELD ]

‘It’s Getting Unfriendlier’: International Students Race to Find Jobs

Students say they have been passed over for jobs and interviews because of visa restrictions. Some have a Plan B: leaving the United States.

For decades, international students hoping to stay in the United States after graduation faced relatively few barriers. Temporary employment programs designed to attract skilled talent made it easy to transition from studying to working. And employers were eager to hire these students, especially those with STEM degrees.

But that once open road to a job in the United States is now full of hurdles.

The Trump administration has upended the H-1B program, a skilled-worker visa sought by many international students, by imposing a $100,000 fee on new applicants and introducing a new lottery based on wage levels. And Homeland Security has indefinitely paused the processing of visa applications for people from 39 countries.

The director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services added to the uncertainty by questioning the future of the Optional Practical Training program, which allows international students to work for up to three years in the country after graduation.

There is also a deadline. Most graduating students have up to five months to find a job before being kicked out of the country.

“It’s just getting unfriendlier and unfriendlier,” said Caroline Liu, 21, a Chinese citizen who is a graduating computer science major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Supporters of the new visa rules say that lowering the number of foreign students — 1.3 million in 2025 — will protect jobs for Americans, especially in a challenging job market. Overall hiring has slowed, tech companies are laying off workers by the thousands, and the rise of A.I. has intensified fears that some jobs will disappear altogether.

The unemployment rate for college graduates increased to 5.6 percent at the end of last year, compared with an overall rate of 4.3 percent at the time, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that “by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down wages,” the new fee on H-1B visa applications ensures “that American businesses who actually want to bring high-skilled workers into our country have the certainty they need.”

A few changes to immigration rules may benefit some international students. The new $100,000 fee for H-1B applicants applies only to people who do not already live in the country, meaning that international students in the United States actually had better odds of winning that visa lottery this year because of fewer applications from people abroad.

In interviews with more than a dozen graduating students, few said they had expected an easy path to finding a stateside job, especially in this market.

But the new hurdles, they said, have been frustrating and nerve-racking. Some described promising interviews that suddenly went south when their visa status came up. Others wondered whether the visa question on applications automatically screened them out.

“I applied to over 700 jobs,” said Sid Chakravarthy, 21, a graduating math and economics major at Boston University who was born and raised in Dubai. “The first 500 I think I was getting auto rejected, even for jobs I qualified for.”

Many students had taken out loans or dipped into family savings with the hope that after graduation, they could stay and gain valuable work experience, which could be another step toward settling in the United States in the long term.

- Authors: Amy Qin and Pooja Salhotra, The New York Times

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80% JOBS 2030 : A.I. GLOBAL ESSAY

ON The World Students Society - for every subject in the world - the Founders have taken the '' Technological Shock '' from A.I. pretty badly. We simply read, research and sense - and thus plan for the worst.

Economist Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the authors of a recent research paper argued that Technological advancements '' sometimes take decades to appear in the economy in the form of increased productivity but I don't think it's going to be decades this time. ''

Economist Brynjolfsson stands out among economists for his confidence in A.I.'s impact. But his forecasts look sober compared with many coming out of Silicon Valley.

Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, has warned that A.I. could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within years.

The tech investor Vinod Khosla predicted last year that A.I. would replace 80 percent of jobs by 2030.  Elon Musk has said the technology will render work ''optional.''

Many economists dismiss such predictions, arguing that the A.I. debate should focus less on where the economy will wind up in the end and more on the potentially difficult period of transition.

'' The pressing question is, You're going to have a technological shock - how painful is it going to be? '' said Ms. Gimbel of the Yale Budget Lab.

The spread of A.I. does not have to mean large-scale job losses, economists argue. As much as 70 percent of jobs, by some estimates, are in some way exposed to A.I. But that does not necessarily mean those workers are about to be laid-off.

In a report published recently, researchers at Boston Consulting Group estimated that more than half of the jobs in the United States would be '' reshaped '' by artificial intelligence over the next two to three years but that far fewer would be replaced entirely.

Most workers perform a range of tasks in their jobs, only some of which can be done reliably by A.I. 

And even where it may be possible to replace a worker, companies are proceeding cautiously, because the stakes are higher if humans are no longer signing off on the computer's work.

This Master Essay Publishing continues. The World Students Society thanks Ben Casselman.

SHRINK* -WORK- SHROUD : A.I.'S SCREAMING PROFIT ESSAY

DIRE PREDICTIONS about A.I.'s impact on employment have shaken up the finance class before, most recently in February when a bleak research report briefly joined the stock markets by predicting :

That A.I. would force well-paid professionals to take up Uber driving. Many major employers of white-collar workers describe A.I. technology as a tool that can eliminate the more tortured aspects of desk life, and say it will free-up office workers to pursue more valuable, higher-earning pursuits.

PROFITS soar at U.S. banks, and even around many, many organisations in the world as A.I. helps shrink work forces. Efficiency has improved as technology automates a range of industry roles.

Less than four months ago, Bank of America's chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, volunteered in a TV interview what he would say to his 210,000 employees about the chance of artificial intelligence replacing human work.

'' You don't have to worry,'' he said. '' It's not a threat to their jobs.''

So very recently, after Bank of America reported $8.6 billion in profit for the first quarter - $1.6 billion more than the same period a year earlier - Mr. Moynihan struck a different tone.

The bank's bottom line, he said, was helped by shedding 1,000 JOBS through attrition by. '' eliminating work and applying technology, '' which he repeatedly specified was artificial intelligence.

He predicted more of that in the months and years to come. '' A.I. gives us places to go we haven't gone,'' Mr. Moynihan said.

The veneer of Wall Street longstanding assertion - that A.I. will enhance human work and not replace it - is rapidly peeling away, as evidenced by the current quarterly earnings season.

JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up  $47 billion in collective profits, up 18 percent, while shedding 15,000 employees.

ALL OF THEM credited A.I. to some degree with helping cut jobs and automate work in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office,  where seven-figured salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients.

Unlike executives in Silicon Valley, few major financial figures are stating outright that A.I. is eliminating jobs.

Citi, for example, has pledged to shrink its workforce by 20,000  people through what one executive described to financial analysts last week as the company's ''productivity and efficiency journey.''

The bank is paying for A.I. software from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, to automatically read legal documents, approve account openings, send invoices for trades and organize sensitive customer data, among other tasks, according to public statements by bank executives and two people familiar with Citi's systems.

Among the recent job cuts at Citi were scores of employees who were part of the bank's '' A.I. Champions and Accelerators '' program, according to the two people, who were not permitted by the bank to speak publicly.

The program involves Citi employees who perform their day jobs while also working to persuade their colleagues to adopt A.I. technologies.

This Master Essay continues. The World Students Society thanks Rob Copeland.

WOMEN FARMERS WONDER : HONOURS PRECIS

IN the global conversation about food security and agricultural innovation, one group remains largely invisible; women farmers.

Across developing regions, women contribute significantly to agriculture labour. In some areas, they make up nearly 40-50 percent of the farm workforce, but they own less land and receive fewer financial resources than men.

Despite cultivating crops, managing livestock and sustaining households, their contributions are often unpaid and unrecognised.

Women farmers face barriers, like lack of land ownership tights, limited access to credit, inadequate training and minimal representation in decision-making bodies.

According to international agricultural studies, if women had equal access to resources, farm yields could increase substantially, reducing global hunger rates.

The World Students Society thanks Amina Kashani.

WILD HIRING WEST : A.I.'S STUDENTS ESSAY

THE DECLINE in hiring is visible right across the world. In the United States tech jobs declined by about 150,000 from 2020 through 2025.

'' The tech labor pool and talent pool is definitely reassembling,'' said Ted Egan, chief economist for the City and County of San Francisco. '' A.I. is a big reason for that.''

Part of tech's reassembly is happening at start-ups. Gone is the traditional process of raising a boatload of venture capital funding, not worrying about revenue or profit and hiring heavily.

Today's start-ups are tapping A.I. tools like agents - personal assistants that can take actions on their own - to make money and grow with fewer employees.

NOW, a software company can launch multiple agents, and each one can do the work of 10-20 employees,'' said Priya Saiprasad, an investor at Touring Capital.

On its way out, too, is the business model that has become the bedrock of a sector called '' software as a service, '' where customers subscribe to use software applications on the internet, rather than buy or install those apps on their own computers.

Over the past three decades, software providers have charged businesses based on the number of employees who used their software - and enjoyed regular revenue growth as those firms grew.

That business model, known as '' seat-based '' or '' per seat '' pricing, has been the centerpiece of tech giants like Salesforce, which makes sales and marketing software, and ServiceNow, which automates corporate processes.

But seat-based pricing is threatened by A.I. The business model is all predicated on the fact that, if a company does well, it needs a lot more employees, '' Ms. Saiprasad said.

'' The irony is that, in this A.I. world, that does not equal success '' because fast-growing companies might expand by adding so-called agents instead of hiring people.

Some software providers are predicting that A.I. will automate certain jobs, so their customers will have fewer employees to use their software.

Others are adding A.I. features that require more computing resources and are more expensive for them to offer. And they all are facing competition from '' open source '' or free-to-use, A.I. tools that could replace their products altogether.

'' Right now, with A.I. it's the wild, wild west,'' said Alex Zulkin, a software analyst at Wolfe Research. Software providers and their customers are '' in a state of massive, simultaneous experimentation.''

This Master Essay continues. The World Students Society thanks Kalley Huang, and Erin Griffith and Joe Rennison.

! WOMEN CENTRIC WONDER ! : PRECIS PROUD PAKISTAN

THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY avails itself of the honour to nominate and endorse and name '' Women Centric Module Pakistan '' to the ever lasting memory of esteemed founder of !WOW!  engineer Haleema Zia's late mother. 

'' May God Almighty God bless her and grant her place in Heavens.''

ISLAMABAD : Women-centric opportunities finally get in focus. Women's role in environmental protection, home gardening and digital skills come to the fore.

The Youth Development Association [ YDA ] marked the international Women's Day in Iqbal Town, Islamabad under the global theme '' Give Opportunities to Gain Gender Equality.''

The event brought together scores and scores of women, well over 125 women from diverse backgrounds, including educationists, health professionals, lawyers, women religious leaders, law enforcement representatives, students and domestic workers.

Esteemed Saleema Munir, Director of Programme at YDA, welcomed participants and explained that the seminar aimed to inspire, equip and empower women to work towards gender equality by expanding opportunities for quality education and employment.

In her keynote address, Munir noted that Pakistan ranks 148th in the Global Gender Gap Index report Report 2025, describing the position as deeply concerning.

Referring to the International Women's Day theme '' Give to Gain,'' she stressed that when societies provide women with equal opportunities in education, skills development and employment, they gain economic stability, healthier families and stronger communities.

The World Students Society thanks Zulfiqar Baig.

India's Job Paradox

India's young are more educated than ever. So why are so many jobless?

India's youth story is a study in contradictions - of abundance and scarcity, promise and drift.

As the British economist Joan Robinson once quipped, whatever "you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true".

Few studies illustrate that paradox more crisply than the latest State of Working India report by Azim Premji University.

Start with the headline number: 367 million young people between the ages of 15 and 29 - the largest youth population in the world, and making up a third of India's working-age population.

Of them, 263 million are not in education and constitute the potential workforce.

It is an enviable demographic bulge, the kind that powered East Asia's economic miracles. Yet, beneath this statistical bounty lies more troubling arithmetic.

There is, at first glance, reason for optimism.

Over four decades, the country has transformed its educational landscape, the report finds.

Enrolment in high school and colleges has surged, broadly keeping pace with India's development levels. Gender gaps have narrowed. Caste barriers, though far from erased, have reduced.

Between 2007 and 2017, the share of students from the poorest households enrolled in higher education rose from 8% to 17%.

A far more educated and connected generation is entering the labour market. Young workers are moving out of agriculture faster than older cohorts over the long term, finding opportunities in manufacturing and services.

On paper, this looks like the making of a classic demographic dividend.

"Never before have so many young Indians been as educated and as connected," the report says.

The bad news: the transition from education to employment remains stubbornly broken.

Graduate unemployment in an increasingly challenging labour market is strikingly high. The last half decade has not generated salaried jobs in adequate numbers, the report finds.

Nearly 40% of graduates aged 15-25 - and 20% of those aged 25-29 - are jobless, far higher than among the less educated, the report finds. Only a small share secure stable, salaried jobs within a year.

Part of this reflects how labour markets evolve over a life cycle. As Rosa Abraham, economist and lead author of the report, told me: "When you're young, you wait - and report unemployment."

Track the same cohort over time and joblessness falls; by their late 20s, many are working, says Abraham.

Early joblessness, she argues, reflects an "aspiration-availability mismatch" combined with the ability to wait. Over time, "you mellow, build networks and take what you can", often in the private sector.

- Author: Soutik Biswas, BBC

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