The pitch was simple: Artificial intelligence would be the great leveler, narrowing the gap between junior and senior, credentialed and non-credentialed, freeing workers into higher-value work. Two years and several trillion dollars later, a different pattern is showing up.
Wall Street’s own economists find that the households most exposed to AI’s risks are also the ones cushioned by stock portfolios large enough to absorb them. It’s welcome news that the AI “jobpocalypse” hasn’t materialized, but the technology appears to be compressing wage growth in a half-decade of inflation above target—a trend that hits hardest on the lowest-paid workers in the most-exposed jobs. Corporate profit margins are near postwar highs not because AI made companies more productive, but because firms used it as cover to raise prices while holding wages flat. And a nationwide backlash against AI’s data centers suggests the public felt what was going on the whole time, not to mention their surging electricity bills.
