AKA Review - 12.05.2025

From Fast Company

MIT’s Iceberg Index reveals which U.S. jobs AI can take over right now

By Grace Snelling

When some pundit opines on the utopia of productivity or the immutable job destruction AI will bring, you’ll be glad you read this. A new MIT study shows that AI may replace far more jobs than previously forecast—11.7% rather than the current 2.2% estimate. But by utilizing zip-code level analysis of AI’s impact, MIT’s “Iceberg Index” provides data local governments can use to protect workers and economies. “By measuring exposure before adoption reshapes work, the model enables states [and universities, we add] to prepare rather than react.” Read this article

From The New York Times

Welcome to Our New Era. What Do We Call It?

By Thomas Friedman

The binary, great-power systems of the Cold War era have given way to multiple interconnected ones in a new epoch, here dubbed the “Polycene.” New devices and ubiquitous connectivity magnify every person’s voice and impact on one another and the planet at unimaginable speed and scale. Examining manifestations of this new period in AI, microchips, climate, geopolitics, and social communities, the author concludes “It will be the first era in which humanity must govern, innovate, collaborate and coexist at a planetary scale in order to thrive.” Read this article

From The New York Review of Books

How the Web Was Lost

By James Gleick

Three books by authors active in the evolution of the online world tell a tale of the initial idealism of the Internet and what one author dubs its subsequent “enshittification”—the erosion of privacy, harvest of user data, rise of ruthless tech companies, collapse of traditional media, and loss of a consensus reality. “Enshittification” replaces creativity with extraction, subjugates creators to rich “patrons,” and leaves customers unwitting captives of tech companies that “use the levers of the information economy to consolidate and dominate.” Read this article

From The Atlantic

'A Recipe for Idiocracy'

By Rose Horowitch

American students have been getting worse at math for over a decade. The author examines possible causes, from technology to lowered expectations to the elimination of effective assessment tools. Colleges are responding with more remedial courses for the growing number of students with barely middle-school-level skills. Researchers already predict a significant economic cost from declining quantitative skills. The only optimism is a view that AI will replace the need for foundational math skills, an idea most academics find absurd. Read this article

From The Chicago Booth Review

Why Standardized Tests Remain an Important Part of College Admissions

By Alexander P. Frankel

Research shows that test-optional policies in college admission, which let students apply without standardized test scores, essentially just hide information, leading colleges to make worse decisions. So why do schools stay test optional? Reasons may include virtue signaling, concern over the undue influence of scores even when considered among many other admission criteria, and fear of public scrutiny that could come with being a test-mandatory school. Yet whatever the drawbacks of tests, researchers do not see them disappearing anytime soon. Watch video or read transcript