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Modern service capitals tell themselves they aren’t dependent on one industry, yet diversification may be a thin cushion when the disrupter is a general‑purpose technology. Generative A.I. writes marketing materials, prepares tax returns, cleans data, codes software and drafts lesson plans

The 1970s Gave Us Industrial Decline. A.I. Could Bring Something Worse.

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By 2011, Detroit’s manufacturing employment had plummeted roughly 90 percent compared to what it was in 1950.

The 1970s Gave Us Industrial Decline. A.I. Could Bring Something Worse.

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Francisco and San Jose, Calif., New York and Washington could soon face significant job disruption, thanks to the rise of A.I. In San Jose, a striking 43 percent of workers could see A.I. transform half or more of their tasks.

The 1970s Gave Us Industrial Decline. A.I. Could Bring Something Worse.

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Political developments around the world are pointing us in the direction of continued competition,” says the U.N. Secretary-General’s envoy on technology, Amandeep Singh Gill, emphasizing the need to preserve “pockets of collaboration” between the U.S. and China

5 Predictions for AI in 2025

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In 2025, we’ll begin to see a shift from chatbots and image generators toward “agentic” systems that can act autonomously to complete tasks, rather

5 Predictions for AI in 2025

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paradigm shift: AI predictions aren’t just matching human expertise — they’re changing how we think about forecasting entirely,” said Tetlock

Can AI Predict the Future?

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I want this because I’m in the idea generation business. The best way to generate ideas is to identify the intersections of vectors – things that are happening or might happen – before anyone else. We do that today by reading and listening to smart people. But many of us also know there is a wealth of information in our digital files that would be super useful if only it didn’t take so long to read through them all and process the information within. Desktop search programs help a little. But even the best ones don’t approach what I’m hoping for.

Unlocking Ideas with NotebookLM: Your Personal AI Assistant

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Brynjolfsson and another Stanford scientist, Andrew Haupt, argued in a paper in June that AI companies should develop new “centaur” AI benchmarks that measure human-AI collaboration, to incentivize more focus on augmentation rather than automation. “I think there's still a lot of tasks where humans and machines can outperform [AI on its own],” Brynjolfsson says. Some experts believe that more collaboration between humans and AI could be a feature of the future labor market. Matt Beane, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies AI-driven automation, says he expects the AI boom to create demand for augmentable work—as managing the output of AI becomes increasingly important. “We'll automate as much as we can,” Beane says. “But that doesn't mean there won't be a growing mountain of augmentable work left for humans.”

AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers

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Brynjolfsson says the study offers a lesson on how to maximize the benefits of AI across the economy. He has long suggested that the government could change the tax system so that it does not reward companies that replace labor with automation. He also suggests AI companies develop systems that prioritize human-machine collaboration.

AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers

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The finding backs up what some software developers previously told me about AI’s impact on their industry—namely that rote, repetitive work, like writing code to connect to an API, has become easier to automate. The Stanford study also indicates that AI is eliminating jobs but not lowering wages, at least so far.

AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers

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If A.I. continues to speed or automate creative work, the total volume of cultural “stuff”—podcasts, blog posts, videos, books, songs, articles, animations, films, shows, plays, polemics, online personae, and so on—will increase

A.I. Is Coming for Culture | The New Yorker

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Podcasts thrive on emotional authenticity: a voice in your ear, three friends in a room

A.I. Is Coming for Culture | The New Yorker

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that are literal, or strange, or narrow-minded, or just plain wrong, we will incorporate their responses into our lives unthinkingly. Partly for this reason, Wiener later wrote, “the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

A.I. Is Coming for Culture | The New Yorker

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be taking over. Whole websites seemed to be written by A.I.; models were repetitively beautiful, their earrings oddly positioned; anecdotes posted to online forums, and the comments below them, had a chatbot cadence. One study found that more than half of the text on the web had been modified by A.I., and an increasing number of “influencers” look to be entirely A.I.-generated. Alert users were embracing “dead internet theory,” a once conspiratorial mind-set holding that the online world had become automated.

A.I. Is Coming for Culture | The New Yorker

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In response, it reliably conjured a short news summary that was informative and unsolicitous, not unlike the section in The Economist headed “The World in Brief.” Sometimes I asked Perplexity follow-up questions, but more often I wasn’t tempted to read further. I picked up a book. It turned out that A.I. could be boring—a quality in technology that I’d missed.

A.I. Is Coming for Culture | The New Yorker

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while getting dressed and watch Netflix before bed. In between, there’s Bluesky on the bus, Spotify at the gym, Instagram at lunch, YouTube before dinner, X for toothbrushing, Pinterest for the insomniac hours. It’s a strange way to live. Algorithms

A.I. Is Coming for Culture | The New Yorker

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Therein lies the problem. When so much of that thinking can be offloaded to AI, going analog begins to look like one of the only ways to test comprehension, fairness be damned. After all, previous kinds of technology—like graphing calculators—also forced teachers to make kids write things out longhand. Literally showing one’s work, in writing, became the way students evinced that they understood what the machines did. As AI creeps into schoolwork, handwriting won’t die so much as, once again, provide proof of life.

The End of Handwriting