(Zero Hedge)—A Bay Area startup called Mercor has hired tens of thousands of white-collar contractors for temporary work, training artificial intelligence to perform the very jobs many of them once held, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.
In effect, these white-collar workers are being paid to accelerate their own obsolescence by feeding and perfecting models for chatbot makers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
What is marketed as short-term income increasingly looks like participation in a system that is not on “team humanity,” but instead is perfecting AI’s ability to hollow out even more white-collar work.
“Welcome to the next gig economy. Instead of driving for Uber or delivering Postmates, a new wave of workers is signing up to school AI. These white-collar contractors review and critique the output of the large language models that power chatbots and other AI tools,” the WSJ story read.
Mercor recruits experts across fields such as medicine, law, finance, engineering, writing, and the arts, with pay ranging from $45 per hour to $250 per hour. These contractors spend weeks or months reviewing and critiquing AI model outputs.
WSJ said that 30,000 contractors were hired in 2025 to work on AI models for some of the largest tech companies, furthering chatbot development.
“Many of the people we work with already see AI as inevitable in their field, but that doesn’t mean humans will run out of meaningful work,” a Mercor spokeswoman told the outlet. “Many of our experts see it as their responsibility to infuse their knowledge and expertise into the models to ensure accurate and thoughtful outcomes.”
WSJ spoke with one of the contractors, Katie Williams, 30, who has been working for Mercor for 6 months …
Williams is now about six months into various projects that have involved watching video clips and writing out captions of everything that’s happening in them, and rating the quality of videos generated by prompts. She has mixed feelings about the work.
“I joked with my friends I’m training AI to take my job someday,” she says.
Co-workers in her Slack channel express similar sentiments, she adds. They don’t feel great about training AI but they feel their job prospects are limited.
And another contractor…
After more than 20 years at the same job as an automotive journalist, Peter Valdes-Dapena was laid off in 2024. He spent months sending out résumés for full-time jobs to no avail. He finds freelance work inconsistent and it doesn’t make up for his past salary. Though he saved for his retirement, he’d rather not start dipping in yet.
One day, Mercor popped up in his LinkedIn feed.
The 61-year-old now spends 20 to 30 hours a week critiquing AI’s attempts at writing news articles. He finds the work challenging and says it’s had the pleasant side effect of improving his own writing.
The nature of the work does produce some internal conflict. Valdes-Dapena says journalists will always exist—he thinks people appreciate ideas and writing from humans—but he worries AI could lead to more job losses.
“I didn’t invent AI and I’m not going to uninvent it,” he says. “If I were to stop doing this, would that stop it? The answer is no.”
Our most recent reporting shows that AI-driven workforce disruptions are rising as AI adoption in corporate America continues to rise.
Latest from Goldman on AI adoption by firms:
AI adoption by firms now stands at 17.4% among US establishments according to the Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey. This reflects a significant increase from the 10% adoption rate last reported in late September, but the sharp increase likely mostly reflects a change in the BTOS AI adoption survey question wording from use of AI for “the production of goods and services” to use of AI for “any business function.” Within industries, information, professional, and education firms continue to lead adoption. Publishing and computing firms reported the largest expected increase in AI adoption over the next six months. We continue to see higher adoption rates among subsectors with greater exposure of work tasks to AI automation. Adoption remains the highest among large firms with 250+ employees, 40% of which expect to be using AI in six months. Recent industry surveys suggest that many adopters are already starting to see positive returns on investment from AI business initiatives.
Labor market impacts (via Goldman):
AI’s impact on the overall labor market still remains limited, although AI employment headwinds are visible in specific occupations like marketing, graphic design, customer service, and especially tech (where the share of overall employment has fallen below its long-run trend). Early signs of headwinds are also emerging among younger workers aged 20-30 in industries with higher AI adoption. Since the last update, AI was mentioned in corporate layoffs affecting 44,319 employees (we expect that AI-driven job displacement will eventually affect 6-7% of all workers following full adoption). At the same time, AI-related job openings now account for 28% of all IT job openings and nearly 5% of Indeed.com job postings contain AI-related keywords in the UK, Canada, and Australia.
We wonder which side these contractors are on: team humanity or the robots?
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.