The 2016 presidential election revealed—as nothing earlier than it—one of the most placing but least-expected factors of the worldwide virtual revolution. In a single dramatic vote, the victory of Donald Trump highlighted the emergence of a stark and widening divide among Americas: one primarily based in large, digitally oriented metropolitan areas; the other determined in lower-tech smaller towns, towns, and rural areas.[1] In doing so, the vote displayed—with its stark red-blue map—the underrated energy of era to reshape the geography of nations.
The divide came as a shock to many.[2] Yet it was no longer simply the starkness of the revealed geographical gap that was so disconcerting. Also stressful become the quantity to which the kingdom revealed nearby divides contemplated something critical about the essential nature of rising digital technologies, consisting of diverse forms of automation, along with artificial intelligence (AI).
The sharpened spatial divides did not just mirror random siting selections, on this regard, or the decline of manufacturing (although the ones contributed). Instead, a massive body of educational literature now indicates the new technologies have brought disruptive tools into the financial system that, by way of empowering excessive-degree work and substituting for “ordinary” responsibilities, also are massively rearranging the kingdom’s economic geography.
Most glaring to this point were system-driven dynamics that
Expand the potential of professional people to feature cost, alternative for rote paintings, and inject
winner-take-most—or “movie star”—dynamics into markets.[4] Over time, this initial diffusion of digital tools and automation has ratcheted up the so-known as agglomeration forces that result as people and firms “cluster” in preferred places to percentage statistics, healthy competencies and paintings, and research new matters—with giant impacts on the kingdom’s geography.
In this style, the 2016 election may fit down as the first time society commenced to understand the overall implications of automation’s capability to transform the physical international. As big, techy cities like New York, Washington, and the Bay Area seemed to increasingly inhabit an extraordinary international from the rest of America, the people and locations that have been “left at the back of” revolted.
All of which suggests the need to add every other item to the listing of social and moral dilemmas surrounding the coming AI generation the reality that AI and its tremendous and negative impacts will no longer be allotted calmly, and will probably contribute to the kingdom’s troubling geographical divides. Solving for this challenge will upload but some other precedence to hassle-fixing approximately the “future of work,” worker “adjustment,” and the moral content material of algorithms.
Automation, AI—and place
The link of AI to geography follows from virtual technologies’ tendency to amplify the productiveness of the professional and “substitute” for rote or “recurring” work. Most considerably, Beaudry, Doms, and Lewis showed extra than a decade ago that the towns that followed non-public computer systems earliest and quickest saw their relative wages growth the quickest.[5]Since then, additional evidence has accrued—which include in latest Brookings studies—that digital technology is contributing closely to the divergence of regional economies and the
“turn away” or “celebrity” cities from smaller ones and the rural hinterland.
