Hochul launches AI workforce push with focus on women - Axios

Ah, marvellous. Governor Kathy Hochul has responded to the AI wave by launching listening sessions for women, the demographic most likely to be steamrolled by automation, which is rather like handing out blankets to passengers on the Titanic and calling it a safety policy. Never mind that the jobs in question evaporate on a quarterly earnings call, not on a listening schedule; the commission is, after all, only 'monitoring'. The sessions feed into her FutureWorks Commission, which is tasked with monitoring AI's impact on workers and proposing solutions by year's end. One can already picture the final report, bound in tasteful pastel, concluding that AI has 'disproportionately affected' women and recommending 'further research'.

Now, credit where it is due, a governor admitting that job disruption is gendered is marginally ahead of the industry's line, which is that everyone loses equally. But 'monitoring' is a spectator sport: it implies the damage is already underway and the state will politely observe it, maybe file some minutes. The listening sessions are a PR exercise dressed as compassion — one imagines a woman explaining that her medical billing role was automated and a staffer nodding sagely before asking if she has considered reskilling into 'prompt engineering'. One almost admires the audacity of calling that a 'solution'.

And the year-end deadline? Absolutely delicious. Four months of listening, synthesising, and producing a document that will be praised by all parties and implemented by none, unless of course you count the inevitable recommendation to 'expand public-private partnerships'. No point deploying actual resources — the commission might need those for its website. Still, if women are lucky, the report will include a QR code to a free online course, and possibly a webinar series. Progress, ladies. Progress, apparently, is listening sessions, though somehow one suspects the listening will be done by women and the solutions by commissions.