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💥 Bill Gates proposes ‘Human Reserved’ jobs
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- Bill Gates has floated the idea of "Human Reserved" jobs, occupations society would deliberately keep for people even when AI could handle them, naming childcare and jury service as roles humans are clearly better suited to.
- He says at most 40% of jobs could realistically be protected, either permanently or temporarily for workers who cannot retrain, with education and healthcare kept selectively rather than shielded across the board.
- To back this up, Gates wants to tax AI tokens and robots instead of banning automation, calling it a bigger change to the tax system than any in his lifetime while listing objections he cannot answer.
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⚖️ Meta pays $16.7B in teen addiction case
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- Meta agreed to a proposed $17 billion settlement with 51 states, ending claims that it built Facebook and Instagram to hook children while hiding the risks those apps posed to young users.
- Beyond the payout, spread over 10 years, Meta must set a default two-hour daily limit and a midnight-to-6am block for users under 18, both changeable only by a parent.
- The deal also bans "like" counts and cosmetic surgery filters for minors, offers an algorithm-free feed option, and requires an independent auditor with wide access to the company's information.
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🏗️ Data center backlash reshapes the midterms
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- Growing anger over data centers across the U.S. has upended the 2026 midterm elections, forcing politicians from both parties to distance themselves from projects while President Trump defends an industry expected to draw over $700 billion this year.
- The land-hungry projects have joined conservative ranchers and left-leaning environmental groups worried about water and farmland, as seen with Project Jupiter, a $165 billion Oracle and OpenAI complex planned near New Mexico's drought-stricken border.
- Governors are toughening rules, with Texas's Greg Abbott ordering steps to shield residents from higher electric bills and vowing to strip the state's billion-dollar-plus yearly tax break for data centers.
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🚀 SpaceX to build $100B Louisiana spaceport
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- SpaceX plans to build Starbase Louisiana, a $100 billion spaceport spread across 125,000 acres on the Gulf Coast, becoming its fourth and largest launch site with room to support thousands of missions each year.
- The self-sustaining facility will hold five launch complexes, each with two pads and a propellant farm, plus power generation, deep-water shipping, and an airport, with construction starting in 2027 and the first launch targeted for 2029.
- Officials expect 3,000 direct jobs paying about $92,600 on average, but the marshland site near protected wildlife has alarmed residents and conservation groups worried about noise, traffic, and damage to fisheries, birds, and wetlands.
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🤖 Zuckerberg's plan to replace thousands of Meta workers with AI fell apart
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- Mark Zuckerberg's plan to swap thousands of Meta employees for AI, known as Project OT, collapsed after the CEO scrapped a second round of layoffs planned for November, according to documents seen by Reuters.
- The scheme aimed to shrink teams by up to 60%, running two waves of cuts in May and November, with small human "talent-dense" groups overseeing virtual AI workers and new "AI systems" helping decide promotions.
- The effort backfired as heavier AI coding caused more outages and possible data leaks, spiking to 405 incidents and forcing staff to spend up to 70% of their time fixing problems, though Meta still cut 10% of its workforce.
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🛑 Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk
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- Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, its 21-year-old marketplace for paying people to do small online tasks, with the service set to shut down permanently on September 30, 2026.
- Launched in 2005, MTurk let companies split big projects into tiny jobs called Human Intelligence Tasks, paying pennies each for work like image labeling, transcription, surveys and content moderation across a workforce that once topped 500,000.
- The platform declined as rivals like Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific took over, and a 2023 study found up to 46% of workers in one experiment used AI to complete tasks meant for humans.
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