Post: The Next Stage of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Revolution Has Arrived — Say Hello to Digital Labor

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"Digital labor" used to be a synonym for the gig economy. You were part of that movement if your work was done online, or if your jobs were assigned by a central platform in the cloud. I’ve been living that life for nearly two decades now; popular examples of this digital labor approach include the Uber (NYSE: UBER) ride-sharing service and the Fiverr International (NYSE: FVRR) gig-connecting service for digital freelancers.

But the term found a new life in the last two years. When the ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) platform came along, some would call it "digital labor" when a human crafted effective prompts to be fed into generative AI systems. And now the AI revolution is taking the next logical step — in 2025, digital labor often refers to automated AI agents that can set their own tasks and plan out complex data management activities.

This form of digital labor can help people achieve more with less work. Critics argue that it’s a slippery slope, perhaps leading up to self-aware AI systems with dangerous priorities. Is digital labor the first step into a better future, or is the Terminator movie franchise’s SkyNet coming up next? Why ChatGPT won’t become Skynet anytime soon

First of all, the AI industry is a long way away from self-aware machines. ChatGPT may be good at summarizing long texts and its sister service Dall-E 3 usually puts the right number of fingers on people in its generated images, but that’s as far as it goes. Even the best image generators often get basic details wrong in 2025.

I’ve seen a ton of AI-generated text, made by the best large language models (LLMs) with expertly crafted prompts and highly specific, high-quality data. The results are still repetitive, clumsy, and full of incorrect analysis.

Tech giants like Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) have been working on self-driving cars for years. These systems get better all the time, but truly autonomous vehicles aren’t a thing yet. Experts in the field think self-driving vehicles […]

The Next Stage of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Revolution Has Arrived — Say Hello to Digital Labor