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What AI is doing to work: displacement studies, productivity research, labor disputes and workforce policy, updated daily.
A Practice Auditing Framework for Large Language Model Use: Collective Empiricism, Pseudo-Rational Cognition, and Governance of AI-Generated Content
Large language models are increasingly used for knowledge acquisition, code generation, academic writing, and agent-based automation. In these settings, users may obtain highly structured answers, plans, and judgments without sufficient domain practice. This paper proposes a practice auditing framework for LLM use and AI-generated content governance. It introduces collective empiricism to describe how LLMs compress and reorganize large-scale human experience into outputs that appear empirical an
An NLP-Driven Framework for Curriculum-Labor Market Alignment: Schema-Constrained LLM Extraction, ESCO-Anchored Semantic Matching, and Multi-Dimensional Gap Quantification
Schema-constrained information extraction from diverse educational and labor-market corpora remains an open challenge in natural language processing because existing pipelines rely primarily on lexical-surface methods that cannot recover implicit competencies, lack grounding in shared taxonomies, and provide no formal measures of extraction reliability or document-level completeness. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a four-stage NLP framework that combines (i) schema-constrained
The Main Barrier to AI Adoption in the Public Sector is Lack of Training: How a Structured Method Accompanied Productivity Gains in Two Brazilian Government Cases Without Incidents
The adoption of generative artificial intelligence in the public sector has been treated predominantly as a technological problem, with the expectation that productivity gains would follow from increasingly capable models. This paper argues, drawing on two auditable cases in the Brazilian Public Service, that the determining barrier to adoption observed in these units was not technological but training-related, and describes the four-layer structured pedagogical methodology developed by the auth
Cancer workforce—a global crisis: a Lancet Oncology Commission
AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China
Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injecti
Syll: Open-Source Personal Automation with Cross-Surface Execution
Personal AI agents must increasingly operate across APIs, shells, web surfaces, and desktop GUIs, yet many systems remain tuned to a single interface and offer limited support for user teaching and auditability. We present Syll, an open-source, self-hosted multimodal agent harness that unifies MCP/API tools, CLI execution, and visual GUI control in a modular runtime, enabling agents to coordinate computer use across heterogeneous interfaces while streamlining how users and agents exchange inform
SwarmHarness: Skill-Based Task Routing via Decentralized Incentive-Aligned AI Agent Networks
Vast quantities of compute (GPU cycles on personal workstations, idle inference servers, and edge devices between jobs) go unused because no incentive-aligned protocol exists for their owners to share them safely and profitably. Existing approaches either require a trusted central coordinator (cloud marketplaces), demand heavy blockchain infrastructure (Golem, BrokerChain), or lack an incentive layer entirely (BOINC, Petals). We propose SwarmHarness, a decentralised protocol in which HarnessAPI
From Learning Resources to Competencies: LLM-Based Tagging with Evidence and Graph Constraints
Linking learning resources to a structured competency framework is key to enabling competency-based search and curriculum analytics in Learning Management Systems (LMS). However, manual tagging is labor-intensive, and fully automatic methods often lack transparency. In this paper, we present an end-to-end alignment pipeline that uses a large language model (LLM) as a constrained, evidence-producing tagger. LMS resources -both instructional content and assessments -are first segmented into meanin
Semantic Robustness Probing via Inpainting: An Interactive Tool for Safety-Critical Object Detection
Testing object detectors in safety-critical domains requires semantically meaningful probes beyond pixel-level corruptions. We present SemProbe, a tool for semantic robustness probing: users upload deployment images, create masks manually or automatically, select operational design domain-derived factors (or custom prompts), and run diffusion-based controlled inpainting. The system supports batch jobs, parallel seed/workflow variations, and configurable generation parameters. After each output,
Generative AI impacts on intra-urban inequality and skill premium in Beijing
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is the first automation wave to reach high-cognitive tasks at scale, yet its effects on intra-urban inequality remain largely unknown. Using 5 million job postings from Beijing (2018--2024), we construct a neighborhood-level GenAI Exposure Index by aggregating task-level assessments from five leading large language models. We examine the spatial, structural and causal mechanisms of this shock. We find that GenAI exposure is highly concentrated in the ci
Agent Manufacturing: Foundation-Model Agents as First-Class Industrial Entities
Manufacturing has passed through four widely recognized paradigms - mechanization, electrification, programmable automation, and Smart Manufacturing - each defined by the kind of work it shifted from humans to machines. In every case, one layer of industrial work remained fundamentally human: the coordinative cognition of production, comprising the interpretive, allocative, diagnostic, negotiative, and governance work exercised by engineers, planners, and operational managers. We argue that a fi
Position: Adopting AI in Practice Does Not Guarantee the Productivity Boost
This position paper argues that adopting AI in organizational practice does not guarantee productivity gains, because human and environmental factors critically moderate the relationship between AI deployment and realized productivity improvements. Following the advent of high-performance generative models, AI use has been rapidly encouraged in some sectors while being restricted in others. Most practitioners assume that AI brings productivity boosts owing to enhanced technical capabilities, but
From Replacement to Orchestration: A Socio-Technical Architecture for Agentic AI in Corporate R&D
Purpose: Corporate R&D faces a persistent productivity paradox: rising investment and expanding scientific knowledge have not translated into proportional innovation output. In pharmaceuticals this is captured as Eroom's Law; analogous patterns appear across engineering, materials science, and healthcare. The core cause is not insufficient tools but cognitive saturation: researchers spend an increasing share of their effort on coordination, documentation, and data governance -- hidden work that
What Medicine Taught Us About Fairness and What It Missed: Lessons from Reconsidering Race-Specific Lung Function Reference Algorithms
Since 2019, medical societies have reconsidered race-specific clinical equations often in parallel to and largely independent from algorithmic fairness research. Focusing on lung function reference algorithms that affect medical care, insurance, and employment for hundreds of millions globally, we analyze the transition from race-specific GLI-2012 to race-averaged GLI-Global through a fairness lens. Drawing on historical context, citation analysis, and quantitative evaluation, we show (i) limite
Foundation Protocol: A Coordination Layer for Agentic Society
Autonomous agents are moving from tools into a layer of social infrastructure: they browse, purchase, deploy software, manage systems, and increasingly interact with one another. As these systems scale, the bottleneck shifts away from raw model capability toward coordination. Agents need to form reliable relationships, organize multi-agent work, exchange value, support an AI economy, and stay safe and accountable under real-world oversight. This paper introduces the Foundation Protocol (FP), a g
AutoResearch AI: Towards AI-Powered Research Automation for Scientific Discovery
Scientific research is being reshaped by AI systems that move beyond isolated assistance toward longer-horizon workflows spanning literature grounding, hypothesis generation, experimentation, validation, reporting, and revision. This shift marks a transition from task-level AI for science to workflow-level research automation. Yet current systems remain fragmented, differing in autonomy, domain scope, execution environment, validation mechanism, and human oversight, while still struggling with e
Dream machine -- the next creative economy
We examine the structural transformation of creative industries under generative artificial intelligence, drawing on 374 primary sources spanning policy documents, industry data, creator surveys, and platform analytics. Beginning with the December 2024 release of OpenAI's Sora video model as a watershed event, we trace the historical pattern of creative resistance to technological disruption, then develop an analytical framework -- the Human-AI Agency Continuum for mapping the spectrum of human
Design for Manufacturing: A Manufacturability Knowledge-Integrated Reinforcement Learning Framework for Free-Form Pipe Routing in Aeroengines
Design for manufacturing plays a critical role in advanced aeroengine development, where complex components necessitate careful consideration of manufacturability. However, current practices in pipe routing remain largely decoupled from down-stream manufacturing, leading to labor-intensive, trial-and-error iterations to achieve manufacturable designs. To address this problem, this study proposes the Frenet-based pipe routing optimization (FPRO) framework, a manufacturability knowledge-integrated
From Automated to Autonomous: Hierarchical Agent-native Network Architecture (HANA)
Realizing Level 4/5 Autonomous Networks (AN) demands a shift from static automation to agent-native intelligence. Current operations, reliant on rigid scripts, lack the cognitive agency to handle off-nominal conditions. To address this, this letter proposes a hierarchical multi-agent reference architecture enabling high-level autonomy. The framework features a Dual-Driven Orchestrator that coordinates specialized Executive Agents, supported by a shared Public Memory for unified domain knowledge.
BLINKG: A Benchmark for LLM-Integrated Knowledge Graph Generation
Generating Knowledge Graphs (KGs) remains one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks for knowledge engineers, as they need to identify semantic equivalences between input data sources and ontology terms. While declarative solutions (e.g., RML, SPARQL-Anything) have helped to generalize this process, aligning input schema elements with ontology terms still involves intricate transformations and requires considerable manual effort. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), the
What is ethical: AIHED driving humans or Human-Driven AIHED? A conceptual framework enabling the ‘ethos’ of AI-driven higher education
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming higher education (HE) through personalised learning, predictive analytics, and intelligent automation. However, concerns over algorithmic bias, privacy, and inequity necessitate governance models that prioritise Human Intelligence (HI). This study introduces the Human-Driven AI in Higher Education (HD-AIHED) framework, which embeds stakeholder-driven HI, particularly in decision-making and feedback across all five AI lifecycle phases: adoption (multi-
AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide
AI-assisted research is crossing a threshold: fully automated systems can now generate research papers for as little as $15, while long-horizon agents can execute experiments, draft manuscripts, and simulate critique with minimal human input. Yet this productivity frontier exposes a deeper integrity problem: under scientific pressure, even frontier LLMs still fabricate results, miss hidden errors, and fail to judge novelty reliably. Studying developments through April 2026, we present an end-to-
Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis
Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of percei
Synthetic Sociality: How Generative Models Privatize the Social Fabric
We put forth a critical theoretical framework for analyzing generative models both descriptively and normatively. Our thesis is that generative models automate the production not only of intellectual labor or intelligence, but of a broader set of human social capacities we name "social doing." We do this by historicizing the commodification of sociality in the digital economy, leading to the availability of social data as the precondition for generative models. We elaborate our definition of "so
Beyond Inefficiency: Systemic Costs of Incivility in Multi-Agent Monte Carlo Simulations
Unconstructive debate and uncivil communication carry well-documented costs for productivity and cohesion, yet isolating their effect on operational efficiency has proven difficult. Human subject research in this domain is constrained by ethical oversight, limited reproducibility, and the inherent unpredictability of naturalistic settings. We address this gap by leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) based Multi-Agent Systems as a controlled sociological sandbox, enabling systematic manipulation
Causal Fairness for Survival Analysis
In the data-driven era, large-scale datasets are routinely collected and analyzed using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to inform decisions in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, employment, and criminal justice, raising concerns about the fairness behavior of these systems. Existing works in fair ML cover tasks such as bias detection, fair prediction, and fair decision-making, but largely focus on static settings. At the same time, fairness in temporal contexts, parti
The Open-Box Fallacy: Why AI Deployment Needs a Calibrated Verification Regime
AI deployment in sensitive domains such as health care, credit, employment, and criminal justice is often treated as unsafe to authorize until model internals can be explained. This often leads to an excessive reliance on mechanistic interpretability to address a deployment challenge beyond its intended scope. We argue that the gate should instead be calibrated verification: authorization should be domain-scoped, independently checkable, monitored after release, accountable, contestable, and rev
Fairness of Explanations in Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Unifying Framework, Axioms, and Future Direction toward Responsible AI
Machine learning algorithms are being used in high-stakes decisions, including those in criminal justice, healthcare, credit, and employment. The research community has responded with two largely independent research fields: \emph{algorithmic fairness}, which targets equitable outcomes, and \emph{explainable AI} (XAI), which targets interpretable reasoning. This survey identifies and maps a novel blind spot at their intersection, which is a model that can satisfy every standard fairness criterio
Cost-of-Ethics Crisis: Beliefs, Decisions, and Justifications in the Job Searches of Computer Science Students in Canada and the United States
Workplace norms in computer science have received growing attention due to a series of recent ethical scandals. One type of response has been a push to improve the ethics education provided to computer science students. Evidence for the effectiveness of ethics education remains mixed; some evidence suggests that norms are changing, while gaps between stated values and practice remain. Our focus here is on whether students, who have received some contemporary CS ethics education, are able to effe
Governing AI-Assisted Security Operations: A Design Science Framework for Operational Decision Support
Engineering managers increasingly must decide how to introduce generative artificial intelligence (AI), retrieval-augmented generation, and coding agents into high-risk operational functions without weakening accountability, privacy, cost discipline, or auditability. The central message of this study is that AI-assisted operational decision support should be managed as a governed engineering capability before it is scaled as automation. Security operations centers (SOCs) provide a suitable setti
Learning Displacement-Aware WiFi Representations for Weakly Supervised Relative Localization
WiFi fingerprint-based indoor localization has been widely studied, but most existing approaches focus on absolute positioning and rely on dense coordinate annotations, which are costly to obtain at scale. In this paper, we study a fundamentally different problem: relative localization, where the goal is to directly estimate the displacement between two WiFi fingerprint traces without predicting their absolute positions. To reduce annotation overhead, we adopt weak supervision in the form of ste
Graph Computation Meets Circuit Algebra: A Task-Aligned Analysis of Graph Neural Networks for Electronic Design Automation
EDA problems are graph-structured, but not all graph-structured problems call for the same GNN computation. We argue that successful GNN-for-EDA methods are those whose propagation, aggregation, and supervision align with the native algebra of the target task. Concretely: static timing analysis is a max-plus/min-plus recurrence on a topologically ordered DAG, structurally aligned with asynchronous DAG-GNNs; placement is governed by hypergraph wirelength and density penalties and is exploited by
Caring Without Feeling: Affective Dynamics as the Control Layer of Human-AI Agent Collaboration
AI agents that plan, retain memory across sessions, invoke external tools and act with partial autonomy are transforming human--AI collaboration. Research on affective computing, simulated empathy in large language models, trust in automation and AI safety has illuminated important design principles, yet these literatures remain fragmented. No integrated account explains how affective cues operate within agentic collaboration -- settings in which humans delegate, monitor and correct consequentia
From Review to Design: Ethical Multimodal Driver Monitoring Systems for Risk Mitigation, Incident Response, and Accountability in Automated Vehicles
As vehicles transition toward higher levels of automation, Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) have become essential for ensuring human oversight, safety, and regulatory compliance in a vehicle. These systems rely on multimodal sensing and AI-driven inference to assess driver attention, cognitive state, and readiness to take control. While technologically promising, their deployment introduces a complex set of ethical and legal challenges - ranging from privacy and consent to data ownership and algo
Leveraging Image Generators to Address Training Data Scarcity: The Gen4Regen Dataset for Forest Regeneration Mapping
Sustainable forest management relies on precise species composition mapping, yet traditional ground surveys are labour-intensive and geographically constrained. While Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer scalable data collection, the transition to deep learning-based interpretation is bottlenecked by the severe scarcity of expert-annotated imagery, particularly in complex, visually heterogeneous regeneration zones. This paper addresses the dual challenges of data scarcity and extreme class imba
Driver-WM: A Driver-Centric Traffic-Conditioned Latent World Model for In-Cabin Dynamics Rollout
Safe L2/L3 driving automation requires anticipating human-in-the-loop reactions during shared-control transitions. While most driving world models forecast the external environment, in-cabin intelligence remains strictly recognition-oriented and lacks multi-step rollout capabilities for driver dynamics. We introduce Driver-WM, a driver-centric latent world model that rolls out in-cabin dynamics causally conditioned on out-cabin traffic context. This formulation unifies physical kinematics foreca
Reliable Modeling of Distribution Shifts via Displacement-Reshaped Optimal Transport
Optimal transport (OT) is a central framework for modeling distribution shifts. Because OT compares distributions directly in input space, a well-designed ground metric between observations is essential to ensure that the optimizer does not violate the true geometry of change. We propose Displacement-Reshaped Optimal Transport (ReshapeOT), a method that reshapes the ground metric by integrating observed sample displacements as an additional source of knowledge. Technically, ReshapeOT replaces th
VocalParse: Towards Unified and Scalable Singing Voice Transcription with Large Audio Language Models
High-quality singing annotations are fundamental to modern Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) systems. However, obtaining these annotations at scale through manual labeling is unrealistic due to the substantial labor and musical expertise required, making automatic annotation highly necessary. Despite their utility, current automatic transcription systems face significant challenges: they often rely on complex multi-stage pipelines, struggle to recover text-note alignments, and exhibit poor generaliz
Accountable Agents in Software Engineering: An Analysis of Terms of Service and a Research Roadmap
AI coding assistants and autonomous agents are becoming integral to software development workflows, reshaping how code is produced, reviewed, and maintained. While recent research has focused mainly on the capabilities and impacts of productivity of these systems, much less attention has been paid to accountability: who is responsible when agents generate, modify, or recommend code? In practice, accountability is defined through the Terms of Service (ToS) and related policy documents that govern
MenuNet: A Strategy-Proof Mechanism for Matching Markets
Strategy-proofness is a fundamental desideratum in mechanism design, ensuring truthful reporting and robust participation. Stability is another central requirement in matching markets, widely adopted in applications such as school choice and labor market clearing. In practice, however, these markets are invariably governed by complex distributional constraints, ranging from diversity quotas and regional balance to global capacity slacks, under which stable matchings often fail to exist. This rai