Robert Reich
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Robert Reich. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Robert Reich's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The bargain I made with myself turned out to be with someone else.
I mean this literally. For thirty years, I operated inside an implicit deal: invest in technical skill, build expertise, stay at the frontier, and the economy will reward you. I kept my end. I learned to code in assembler. I built companies. I shipped products. I stayed up later than anyone around me and learned faster than the curriculum demanded. The economy kept its end too — until it didn't.
What unsettled me about Robert Reich was not that he predicted the disruption. Plenty of people predicted it. What unsettled me was that he had mapped the *terms* of the bargain decades before the bargain broke. In 1991, he sorted the workforce into three categories —