Opinion: AI’s benefits are clustering in cities like Seattle. It’s tech inequality again.

The Amazon Spheres, the visual symbol of Amazon’s downtown Seattle campus. The AI industry is still emerging but so is a familiar story: Winner-take-all or winner-take-most cities vs everyone else. — Seattle Times/TNS

In the slow recovery of the early 2010s, Northwestern University economics professor Robert Gordon argued that the big leaps that created massive numbers of jobs – electrification, the internal combustion engine, telephones – were behind us. The future wouldn’t have the same power.

Not everyone agreed, but Gordon’s worries remain to be grappled with, at least on the front of creating large numbers of secure middle-class jobs.