{"id":7497,"date":"2025-08-12T21:33:56","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T21:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=7497"},"modified":"2025-08-12T21:33:56","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T21:33:56","slug":"apres-ai-le-deluge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=7497","title":{"rendered":"Apr\u00e8s AI, le\u00a0D\u00e9luge"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n

By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

I have to admit, I\u2019ve steered away from writing about AI lately. There\u2019s just so much going on, so fast, that I can\u2019t keep up. Don\u2019t ask me how GPT-5 differs from GPT-4, or what Gemini does versus Genie 3. I know Microsoft really, really wants me to use Copilot, but so far I\u2019m not biting. DeepMind versus DeepSeek?\u00a0 Is Anthropic the French AI, or is that Mistral? \u00a0I\u2019m just glad there are younger, smarter people paying closer attention to all this.<\/p>\n

Still, I\u2019m very much concerned about where the AI revolution is taking us, and whether we\u2019re driving it or just along for the ride. In Fast Company<\/em>, Sebastion Buck, co-founder of the \u201cfuture design company\u201d Enso<\/a>, posits<\/a> a great attitude about the AI revolution:<\/p>\n

The scary news is: We have to redesign everything.<\/p>\n

The exciting news is: We get to redesign everything.<\/p>\n

He goes on to explain:<\/p>\n

Technical revolutions create windows of time when new social norms are created, and where institutions and infrastructure is rethought. This window of time will influence daily life in myriad ways, from how people find dates, to whether kids write essays, to which jobs require applications, to how people move through cities and get health diagnoses.<\/p>\n

Each of these are design decisions, not natural outcomes. Who gets to make these decisions? Every company, organization, and community that is considering if\u2014and how\u2014to adopt AI<\/a>. Which almost certainly includes you. Congratulations, you\u2019re now part of designing a revolution.<\/p>\n

I want to pick out one area in particular where I hope we redesign everything intentionally, rather than in our normal short-sighted, laissez-faire manner: jobs and wealth.<\/p>\n

It has become widely accepted that offshoring led to the demise of U.S. manufacturing and its solidly middle class blue collar jobs over the last 30 years. There\u2019s some truth to that, but automation was arguably<\/a> more of a factor \u2013 and that was before<\/em> AI and today\u2019s more versatile robots. More to the point, today\u2019s AI and robots aren\u2019t coming just to manufacturing but pretty much to every sector.<\/p>\n

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The economic implications are the ones that I think could be the most disruptive, the most quickly. We\u2019re talking about whole categories of jobs, where \u2014 not in 30 or 40 years, but in three or four \u2014 half of the entry-level jobs might not be there. It will be a bit like what I lived through as a kid in the industrial Midwest when trade in automation sucked away a lot of the auto jobs in the nineties \u2014 but ten times, maybe a hundred times more disruptive.<\/p>\n

Mr. Buttigieg is no AI expert, but Erik Brynjolfsson, senior fellow at Stanford\u2019s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, is. When asked about those comments, he told Morning Edition<\/em><\/a>: \u201cYeah, he\u2019s spot on. We are seeing enormous advances in core technology and very little attention is being paid to how we can adapt our economy and be ready for those changes.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could look, for example, at the big layoffs<\/a> in the tech sector lately. Natasha Singer, writing in The New York Times<\/em><\/a>, reports on how computer science graduates have gone from expecting mid-six figure starting salaries to working at Chipotle (and wait till Chipotle automates all those jobs<\/a>). The Federal Reserve Bank of New York says<\/a> unemployment for computer science & computer engineering majors is better than anthropology majors, but, astonishingly, worse than pretty much all other majors.<\/p>\n

And don\u2019t just feel sorry for tech workers. Neil Irwin of Axios warns<\/a>: \u201cIn the next job market downturn \u2014 whether it\u2019s already starting or years away \u2014 there just might be a bloodbath<\/a> for millions of workers whose jobs can be supplanted by artificial intelligence.\u201d He quotes Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook: \u201cAI is poised to reshape our labor market, which in turn could affect our notion of maximum employment or our estimate of the natural rate of unemployment.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, you ain\u2019t seen nothing yet.<\/p>\n

While manufacturing was taking a beating in the U.S. over the last thirty years, tech boomed. Most of the world\u2019s largest and most profitable companies are tech companies, and most of the world\u2019s richest people got their wealth from tech. Those are, by and large, the ones investing most heavily in AI \u2014 most likely to benefit from it.<\/p>\n

Professor Brynjolfsson worries<\/a> about how we\u2019ll handle the transition to an AI economy:<\/p>\n

The ideal thing is that you find ways of compensating people and managing a transition. Sad to say, with trade, we didn\u2019t do a very good job of that. A lot of people got left behind. It would be a catastrophe if we made the similar mistake with technology, [which] that also is going to create enormous amounts of wealth, but it\u2019s not going to affect everyone evenly. And we have to make sure that people manage that transition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCatastrophe\u201d indeed. And I fear it is coming.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

We know that CEO to worker pay ratios have skyrocketed<\/a> over the past 40 years. We know that concentration of wealth in the U.S. is also at unprecedented levels<\/a>. And we know that social mobility \u2013 the American Dream of children doing better than their parents, that anyone can make it \u2013 has stalled and is actually lower<\/a> than in many of our peer countries. AI can address those, or make them much, much worse.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s exciting to think of all the things AI is going to do for us. We\u2019ll be able to do old things better\/faster\/cheaper, and do new things that we can barely even dream of now. With it, we should be living in a post-scarcity\/abundance society. But that doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019ll all benefit, and certainly not all benefit equally or equitably.<\/p>\n

Professor Brynjolfsson hits the nail on the head:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m optimistic about the potential to create a lot more wealth and productivity. I think we\u2019re going to have much higher productivity growth. At the same time, there\u2019s no guarantee all that wealth and productivity is going to be evenly shared. We are investing so much in driving the capabilities for hundreds of billions of dollars and we\u2019re investing very little in thinking about how we make sure that leads to widely shared prosperity. That should be the agenda for the next few years.<\/p>\n

So if you\u2019re not thinking about social welfare programs, universal basic income (UBI), baby bonds, and the like, as well as what, exactly, we want humans to spend their days doing, start thinking. As Mr. Buck suggests, start designing the AI revolution we should want.<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented\u00a0<\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By KIM BELLARD I have to admit, I\u2019ve steered away from writing about AI lately. There\u2019s just so much going on, so fast, that I can\u2019t keep up. Don\u2019t ask me how GPT-5 differs from GPT-4, or what Gemini does versus Genie 3. I know Microsoft really, really wants me to use Copilot, but so…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7497"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}