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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 25, 2026; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.
Let’s get to it: for this version, I feel what I came across is so important, I am only focusing on this one new article from earlier this month in this edition of The Real Context News AI Reading List: The Laid-off Scientists and Lawyers Training AI to Steal Their Careers/The laid-off lawyers and PhDs training AI to steal their careers—Josh Dzieza; New York Magazine/The Verge.
This jointly-published article delves head-first into the churning confluence of the waters of AI, the economy, humans, employment, dignity, and, yes, a rapidly-approaching future. And I can personally vouch for much of what’s in this article (indeed, I have been experimenting with similar situations even before they were more mainstreamed). The arbitrariness, inconsistency, complex contracting chain, lack of transparency, near meaningless job-descriptions, organized exploitation, sheer redundancy, and the incredible amount of job-posting market-share these often unheard-of-a-few-years ago companies are taking up bear obvious blinking warnings, and yet so many incredibly well-qualified professionals are left with few if any other options in the current dystopian jobscape. As the lede in New York notes, “Experienced white-collar workers are now part of a miserable gig economy.” Verge goes even farther: “Laid-off lawyers, history PhDs, and scientists are now part of a miserable gig economy in which they’re teaching AI how to do their old jobs. If you’re still employed… [then, in much larger letters:] You could be next.” Both publications choose to frame this overall using the word “miserable,” and, indeed, training your own societal replacement and furthering your own obsolescence our of desperation find and apt descriptor in that mutual choice of word.
For some of you, this is the present, and not the future, of work and what it means to work in this transitioning economy. It has, in part, been my past and my present as a freelance journalist and consultant trying to make it a world stacked up against us freelancers. At the same time, this seems to be the future for many of you for whom this will be new. What I am hoping for is that this affects a critical mass of jobseekers at some point where there can be a massive, organizing, regulatory pushback against so much of this. None of this seems healthy, nor sustainable, nor designed to be sustainable. What’s clear is we have no collective plan, let alone protections, for the changes AI is forcing upon our societies, or at least especially so in the U.S.
So yes, this article is a must-read to understand our recent past, perilous present, and what is to come.
And if you want to spread the word? It’s easy: AI reading list dot com: AIreadinglist.com!
© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome
Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).
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