In the episode of The Sunday Draft, Raj sits down with his oldest friend and fellow IT veteran Nidhin for an honest, unfiltered conversation about the one question nobody wants to answer at work: are we actively enabling AI to replace us?
These are two guys who started their careers in the post-dot-com era, survived every wave of tech change since — Java, cloud, mobile-first — and are now staring down the biggest shift yet. This isn’t a panel of experts. It’s a conversation between people living it.
What We Get Into:
The Mercor Story — A $10 billion startup founded by three 21-year-olds is paying doctors, lawyers, engineers, and IT professionals $50–$150/hour to train AI models for Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The catch? You’re essentially transferring your career’s worth of knowledge into a machine that won’t need you once it’s done learning. We break down how it works, who’s backing it (Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, Larry Summers), and what the growing wave of lawsuits and a major data breach reveal about what’s really going on underneath the hood.
The “2 Years vs 5 Years” Debate — Nidhin thinks IT professionals have about two years before AI fundamentally changes what their jobs look like. Raj thinks maybe five. Neither of them is optimistic. They unpack why this wave feels different from cloud, mobile, or any previous disruption.
The Terminator Timeline — Half joking, completely serious. Our generation grew up watching those movies as fiction. The timelines are starting to line up and that’s not a comfortable thought when you’re in the industry building the tools.
Can You Actually Trust Anthropic? — Raj questions whether Anthropic’s “ethical AI” positioning is genuine conviction or just a smarter marketing strategy. If everyone’s racing to build the same thing, does the branding around safety actually mean anything?
What Happens After the Jobs Go? — The conversation goes beyond careers into what mass displacement actually does to society, economies, and the next generation entering a job market that looks nothing like the one we walked into.
India, Unrest, and the Bigger Picture — The guys connect the dots between youth unemployment, political instability, and the AI wave hitting emerging markets — drawing a line from Bangladesh to what’s stirring in India right now.
Watch on YouTube
We’re Being Paid to Train Our Own Replacements | AI, Mercor & The Future of IT Jobs
Timestamps:
00:00 — Cold open and introductions
04:00 — Did we make the right call going into IT?
08:00 — Why this wave is different from every previous one
13:00 — Mercor explained: hiring humans to replace humans
20:00 — The “we” in “are WE enabling AI” — who’s actually responsible?
28:00 — Can you trust Anthropic’s ethics?
40:00 — What mass job displacement actually looks like
55:00 — India, youth unrest, and the geopolitical angle
1:10:00 — Where do we go from here?
1:17:00 — Closing thoughts and “until they come for us”
Referenced in this episode:
Mercor - Organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy
The Terminator (1984) — still relevant, apparently
About The Sunday Draft
No script. No corporate filter. Every Sunday, we talk about the tech stories that aren’t getting enough honest conversation — from AI and jobs to geopolitics and the world we’re all navigating together. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
If this episode made you uncomfortable, good. That means we’re doing our job. Leave a comment, share it with someone in tech, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
