America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs
February 11, 2026 at 01:43AMHow exactly will AI affect your job? Will it squeeze you out of employment? Will it change your role as a knowledge worker, so that you become a shepherd of many agents, carefully trained to ease your workflow and augment your output? What should the US government do to prepare for our collective, uncertain future—if anything? For The Atlantic, Josh Tyrangiel takes a wry look at the changing employment landscape in the age of artificial intelligence.
AI is already transforming work, one delegated task at a time. If the transformation unfolds slowly enough and the economy adjusts quickly enough, the economists may be right: We’ll be fine. Or better. But if AI instead triggers a rapid reorganization of work—compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, as the International Monetary Fund projects—the consequences will not stop at the economy. They will test political institutions that have already shown how brittle they can be.
The question, then, is whether we’re approaching the kind of disruption that can be managed with statistics—or the kind that creates statistics no one can bear to count.
America would be better off if its elites could act responsibly without being terrified. If CEOs remembered that citizens are a kind of shareholder, too. If economists tried to model the future before it arrives in their rearview mirror. If politicians chose their constituents’ jobs over their own. None of this requires revolution. It requires everyone to do the jobs they already have, just better.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/10/america-isnt-ready-for-what-ai-will-do-to-jobs/
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