Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech For years, a buzzy Silicon Valley startup called Mercor has been hiring an army of desperate job-seekers — often including educated and underemployed experts — to train AI models to replace them in the workforce. It’s a grim facet of an AI-dominated future in which the business world continues to push for automation, hoping to wean itself off relying on pesky and expensive human labor once and for all. As MIT Tech Review reports, an eerily similar situation is now playing out in China. Workers told the publication that their bosses are directing them to painstakingly document their workflows with the eventual goal of automating specific tasks using AI agents, such as OpenClaw, an open-source piece of software that has become immensely popular in the country. Chinese employees already got an early glimpse of what an AI agent-led future could look like. A GitHub project called Colleague Skill, which was originally set up as a joke, went viral …