A.I.’s Effect on the Work Force Is Showing Up in Wages - The New York Times

The New York Times has confirmed that A.I.'s effect on the work force is "showing up in wages," which is the polite phrasing for wages going sideways while the topline goes up. New research says businesses actually implementing the technology are registering slower wage growth in the jobs most exposed to it, plus a pullback in job openings, "especially for young people." Splendid. And the URL slug reads "ai-raises-hiring," which suggests at least one person involved in this story got the memo and then a headline writer overruled them.

The load-bearing word, naturally, is "may." Lower wage growth and slower hiring "may be the result of artificial intelligence" — a hedge that has done more heavy lifting this decade than any statute passed anywhere. Nobody was ever fired by a hedge. The mechanism, as the Times frames it, runs through jobs "most exposed to the technology": the ones whose tasks were already documented, repeatable and priced to the decimal point. The exposure was measured in the only currency a spreadsheet respects — how easily the work can be written down. It was never presented as a threat model. It was the job description.

And observe who is "especially" affected: young people, the cohort with the least leverage and the longest working life ahead of them, now being told the ladder starts one rung higher and the rung has been removed for efficiency. We watched this arrive before, when AI-driven growth was described as "insular" and liable to leave everyone else behind; wages are simply where the leaving gets itemised. The productivity gains are still coming, we're assured. They will be shared, presumably with whoever holds the equity.