Labour wants to pay British companies up to £5,000 for each foreign worker they hire, with firms able to claim up to £25,000 per year in visa-related costs.
The scheme will target sectors including tech, digital, life sciences, and clean energy. The Government will also fast-track UK Expansion Worker license applications, a visa route that allows overseas companies to send staff to Britain to establish UK operations, reducing processing times from several weeks to around 10 days.
The announcement comes just weeks after a major report found that more than 1 million Britons aged 16-24 are not in education, employment, or training (NEET).
Critics say taxpayer money should be used to help young Britons find work rather than making it cheaper for firms to recruit from overseas. Migration Watch UK called the plan a "disaster for young British workers" and warned it would make "the backdoor into Britain even cheaper and more accessible."
Turning someone down for being too old, or Black, or disabled has been illegal for 60 years. So companies found a workaround: let a machine do it.
The software became the perfect alibi. When a human manager rejects every applicant over 50, that's a lawsuit. When a black box does the exact same thing, the company shrugs and blames the algorithm. Same outcome, no fingerprints.
And it runs at a scale no biased manager could dream of. One system screens for 11,500 employers, including most of the Fortune 500. This case alone covers 1.1 billion rejected applications. Apply anywhere big and the same gatekeeper is judging you, with the same blind spots, every single time.
Deniability was always the point. The software never asks your age or your race, so the company gets to say it doesn't discriminate. Then it reads your graduation year, your employment gaps, your name and your zip code, and rebuilds every one of those things anyway. You get filtered out for exactly what the law protects, and everyone pretends a neutral computer made the call.
A judge just ended the pretending. Workday's whole defense was "we're not the employer, we don't make the decision." The court said the company hiding behind the machine and the company that built the machine are both on the hook.
Sixty years of civil rights law, nearly beaten by a dropdown menu that rejects you before a human ever sees your name.
Hot take:
This AI crap is stealing your job while you clap for it. You spent years grinding late nights, fixing bugs, learning the hard way. Now it copies everything and spits out faster work.
People say “wow so amazing” and call it progress.
All that effort feels pointless now.
They’re building tools to replace you and telling you to smile.
Absolutely bullshit.
Dario Amodei now wants AI companies taxed to fund UBI.
The same Dario who says AI wipes half of entry-level white-collar jobs in 5 years.
Read the order of operations.
You build the thing that deletes the jobs.
Then you propose the tax that pays people for not having them.
That's not a policy pivot.
That's pricing in the backlash before it lands.
The layoffs come first.
The check is the apology.
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments, but most of all, because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all-good and deserving of all my love.
I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin. Amen
LEARN TO CODE, THEY SAID
Recent computer engineering grads now have the #2 highest unemployment rate of any major. Computer science is #4.
Both sit above art history and English.
So much for the safe degree.
You worked for forty years.
Up before the alarm. Out in the cold. Through the bad backs and the worse winters. You never once signed on. You were proud of that.
Now you are fifty eight. The body is done. The trade that used you up has no use for you anymore.
And you are sat at home in the middle of the day, not because you are lazy, but because there is nothing left for a man your age who is worn out and ten years short of a pension.
There are two million like you. They will call it worklessness. A statistic. A drain.
They will not call it what it is.
A grafter, used up and thrown back, by a country that took the best of him and left him with nothing to retire on.
You did everything they asked.
And this is the thanks.
Companies have explicitly said AI is the reason they are laying off thousands of employees:
- Cloudflare: 1,100 employees
- Atlassian: 1,600 employees
- Snap: 1,000 employees
- Coinbase: 700 employees
- Cisco: nearly 4,000 employees
- Block: 4,000+ employees
- Wix: 1,000 employees
And there are more. But I don't know how much of this is true or if that's just their excuse for these layoffs. Anyone have more information on this topic?
GitClear recently analyzed over 211 million lines of code to see what AI is actually doing to our code.
The results completely DESTROY the "hyper-productivity" narrative!
1. In 2021, 25% of code changes were refactoring (moving and consolidating code). By 2024, that plummeted to under 10%. Developers aren't taking the time to architect reusable modules anymore; they are just hitting 'Tab' and letting the AI generate another isolated, brute-force function.
2. Commits containing massive blocks of duplicated code skyrocketed by an astounding 800% last year. AI models are trained to predict the next token, not to enforce the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle. When you are building systems with high-stakes logic - like managing timezone conflicts and concurrent reservations for a sports venue booking platform - this kind of duplicated code is exactly how you introduce catastrophic bugs across different files.
3. Almost 8% of all newly added code is now being reverted or heavily revised within just two weeks of being committed. We aren't writing better code; we are just rapidly generating "mistake code" that has to be manually untangled later.
Google’s own DORA report backed this up with a brutal metric: For every 25% increase in AI adoption, delivery stability actually decreased by 7.2%.
When managing engineering teams at scale, the takeaway becomes glaringly obvious: AI is a phenomenal typing accelerator, but it is an atrocious software architect.
Stop measuring developer productivity by how many lines of code were generated this week. Start measuring it by how many lines you didn't have to write because the system was designed correctly the first time.
More code is not a feature. It is a liability.
The backlash against AI - generated content is so visceral - expect the "human-authored" certification gain momentum, esp for fiction. https://t.co/Ld3d8ZMVTw