Essays · After Work
How AI is restructuring professional life — white-collar and blue-collar — and what that means for your career, your industry, and the economy.
16 essays
UBI gets proposed every time automation anxiety peaks. The proposal is serious. The funding math is harder than the advocates admit.
The work that is hardest to automate is the work we have historically valued least. That paradox is about to become very expensive.
Nvidia's market cap crossed $3 trillion. The warehouse workers whose jobs it displaced didn't get a share.
Law was supposed to be safe. It isn't. But the picture is more specific — and more interesting — than the headlines suggest.
The technology does not choose between abundance and catastrophe. We do. And we are choosing now.
Every crisis produces its single-policy salvation. The AI transition has produced several. None of them are adequate.
For most professionals, identity and occupation are inseparable. AI is forcing a separation that no one prepared for.
AI creates enormous value. Almost none of it flows to the people whose work trained the systems that create it.
The work that matters most to human beings is precisely the work that AI is least equipped to perform.
The old bargain — work hard, earn security — is breaking. What replaces it won't emerge on its own.
The headline version of AI displacement — mass layoffs, empty offices — is incomplete. The real story is quieter and more corrosive.
Between 2025 and 2045, the institutional path dependencies will lock in. The window is open. It will not stay open forever.
The reskilling narrative is politically convenient and practically inadequate. Here's what the evidence actually shows.
A radiologist in Minneapolis. A paralegal in Cleveland. A marketing executive with an MBA. None of them failed. All of them were superseded.
Not the reassuring answer. Not the catastrophist answer. The one the evidence actually supports.
A short, honest list. Not every book that exists on the topic — the ones worth your time.