Haimanot B. Atinkut

My guest essay in @nytimes today. I make 5 key points: 1. There’s little clear evidence of AI eliminating jobs at scale yet. But waiting to see is risky. Pittsburgh’s steel towns saw early signs with mini-mills before the losses showed up. Service capitals like London and New York should prepare now rather than after the shock. 2. Diversification helps—but only so much when the disruptor is a general-purpose technology. Being “in many industries” isn’t a shield if the same tool touches them all. 3. High-skill, knowledge jobs have big local multipliers. Each manufacturing job supports 1.6 local jobs; each high-skill tech/professional role supports 5. That means even modest losses of analysts, developers, or paralegals can ripple through restaurants, retail, and transit systems. 4. AI needn’t fully replace workers to matter. It only needs to make work easier. As location and experience matter less at the margin, more work will offshored to cheaper places (e.g. India, UAE, or Philippines). 5. The lesson from deindustrialization isn’t inevitability—it’s reinvention. Detroit poured resources into legacy industries and still declined. Boston repeatedly bet on talent, education, and new sectors.