Reading Room
Things worth reading on expertise, organizational cognition, and what AI deployment actually changes at scale.
Will Wired Belts Become the New Rust Belts? AI and the Emerging Geography of American Job Risk
Hard numbers on who is actually exposed. Information security analysts rank in the top ten most vulnerable occupations nationally. The geographic breakdowns are useful for making the pipeline problem concrete: the organizations most dependent on knowledge-intensive talent are also the ones sitting in the highest-risk metros.
Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
Three preregistered experiments with 1,372 participants find that people adopt AI outputs with minimal scrutiny — accuracy rising and falling in lockstep with whether the AI was correct. The authors call this "cognitive surrender": deliberative judgment is being bypassed rather than augmented. Direct empirical grounding for the CRB thesis.
Economic Index Report: Learning Curves
High-tenure Claude users achieve better outcomes, take on more complex tasks, and collaborate more effectively — evidence of learning-by-doing in AI tool use. The concern: these gains may concentrate among workers who had the chance to accumulate experience first, deepening the divide between those who develop AI judgment and those who don't.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Supply Chain Risks and Mitigations
Joint guidance from NSA, CISA, FBI, and allied agencies treating AI supply chain security as a discipline in its own right — covering training data, models, software, hardware, and third-party services. Useful framing for thinking about how fragility gets baked into AI systems before organizations ever deploy them.
The Iceberg Index: Measuring Skills-Centered Exposure in the Human-AI Labor Market
Simulating 151 million workers and 32,000 skills, MIT finds AI is technically capable of performing work representing 11.7% of U.S. wage value — against the 2.2% where adoption is actually occurring. The gap between technical capability and current use is the iceberg. Most of the exposure is submerged in cognitive and professional work.