60 Minutes Transcript: Artificial intelligence and the future of work – CBS News

October 5, 2026

280

Editor’s Note: I hate CBS, CBS News, Bari Weiss, and the whole screwed up hide this bury this behind paywall, hide this at Paramount Plus, and so on.

One single damn video from 60 Minutes cannot – cannot be downloaded or shared. Useless corporate digital monetization hiding, screw them all. All the media mergers and conglomerations, make CBS THE WORST ONLINE SOURCE FOR NEWS. I WILL ABANDON THEM ALL. Other sites are smarter, CBS is in the hands of bean counters, lawyers, people like Bari. After generations as trusted news source, that is now all gone,

I call CBS now an unreliable, money-grubbing site, no longer giving access and source of valid, postable news. Like my featured image, Edward R. Murrow turns over in his grave. –DrWeb

This past week in Washington, America’s tech titans met with President Trump to talk about, well, the future of humanity … specifically, will AI, artificial intelligence, mark the end of civilization as we know it? Only slightly less grave and only slightly less depressing, there’s a related, more immediate question: Will AI take our jobs?

Real Jon walks out:

That right there? Not me … That was AI. So it is, we don’t exempt ourselves in wondering: is any line of work safe? So far this year, U.S. companies have cited AI as the No. 1 reason for layoffs. AI, after all, doesn’t sleep, or take sick days. Is this technology simply going to transform how and where we work, much the same way other workplace revolutions did? Or is this one different? Is the great job apocalypse upon us?

Tape:

Here in this nondescript office in downtown San Francisco, these 20-somethings are designing the future of your workplace.

You may not have heard of Mercor, but it’s quickly become a leader in a booming new industry built around supercharging the already supercharged rise of artificial intelligence.

BRENDAN FOODY: We were, in January last year, about 20 people.

JON WERTHEIM: How many now?

BRENDAN FOODY: Now it’s 400 people in San Francisco, yeah.

Brendan Foody is [Mercor]’s CEO. It’s now a multibillion-dollar company, and he’s now a 23-year-old billionaire. Backstory: four years ago, ChatGPT came out and Foody and his two co-founders — high school buddies — saw where the technology was heading. To get better, AI needed more information than what was widely available on the internet.

JON WERTHEIM: AI went from this high-powered search engine to all of a sudden we’re in astrophysics. We’ve gone from cutesy to holy moly in a very short amount of time.

BRENDAN FOODY: I think that’s spot on. And the core thing powering that huge transformation and the capabilities is human intelligence.

JON WERTHEIM: It seems like overarching goal, anything we humans can do, we want AI to be able to do.

BRENDAN FOODY: I think a significant portion of things. Everything that humans want AI to be able to do — we wanna teach it how to do that.

So what does Mercor do? Well, when the big AI companies want, say, ChatGPT or Claude to improve in a particular field, they hire Mercor to make their models smarter. Pick a subject, any subject: finance, architecture, poetry. Mercor has assembled an army of more than 100,000 freelancers — humans! — ready to use their hard-earned expertise to train the AI.

Shawna Miller: I work late in the evening …

We met three such experts: Shawna Miller, a winemaker; Robbie Hiser, a music producer; and Melania Poonacha, a physician.

Continue/Read Original Article: 60 Minutes Transcript: Artificial intelligence and the future of work – CBS News