CONCEPT
Average Is Over (Revisited)
Cowen's 2013 prediction of labor market bifurcation between machine-complementary winners and median performers—now empirically confirmed as AI raises floors and ceilings simultaneously, hollowing the middle.
Average Is Over (2013) predicted that intelligent machines would split labor markets into those who could work effectively alongside them and those who could not. The comfortable middle—stable careers, median incomes, credential-protected positions—would hollow out. Returns to exceptional machine-complementary performance would soar; returns to median performance would stagnate or decline. The prediction, controversial in 2013, became testable in 2025 when natural-language AI arrived. The evidence confirms: median knowledge workers face compression as AI matches their output quality at near-zero cost, while workers providing genuine judgment, taste, and integrative capacity capture expanding premiums. The hollowing is not unemployment but repricing—median performance that once commanded middle-class stability now competes directly with algorithmic adequacy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Cowen built the thesis on the freestyle chess model: human-computer teams beat both the best humans and the best computers playing alone. The economy would evolve similarly—winners would be the best collaborators, not the most credentialed or traditionally skilled. The AI moment vindicates this with precision