Thursday, April 23, 2026

Economists Starting to Admit They May Have Been Wrong About AI Never Replacing Human Jobs: They're taking it seriously - Joe Wilkins

As a sweeping economics paper by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Forecasting Research Institute (FRI), and numerous top universities found, that attitude may be shifting. As time goes on, top economic experts are increasingly factoring extreme AI disruption into their models. Yet acknowledging a possibility and accepting its inevitable are two very different things — and as the complicated range of sentiments makes clear, an AI jobs apocalypse is still far from certain. The study is a tour-de-force of economic forecasting that surveyed 69 economists, 52 AI specialists, and 38 “superforecasters,” a term for consistently accurate analysts who play the role of “Dune’s” Mentats in the economics world. It found that all three groups expect “significant” progress on AI in the years to come. Forebodingly, the groups all agreed that, as a rule, faster AI progress means lower employment rates overall. On average, economists assigned a 47 percent probability of “moderate“ AI progress by 2030, defined as systems that can operate semi-autonomous research labs, put out high-quality novels, and complete complex projects with oversight. 

AI is everywhere. The agentic organization isn’t—yet - McKinsey

Most companies are experimenting with AI, but few have realized its value. The real challenge isn’t the technology—it’s redesigning workflows, leadership, and culture for an agentic world. Yes, AI is astonishing: fast, powerful, and learning every day. But even as leaders strike up new pilots across their organizations, most still struggle to translate experimentation into enterprise value—and now, agentic AI is raising the stakes. In this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Senior Partner Alexis Krivkovich speaks with Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly about what it will take to build an “agentic organization”—from reimagining workflows to reshaping leadership roles, skills, and culture for a future where humans increasingly operate above the loop.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/ai-is-everywhere-the-agentic-organization-isnt-yet

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Students are becoming AI fluent. Universities aren’t. - James L. Norrie, University Business

Across higher education, artificial intelligence is too often being governed as though it were primarily an academic integrity issue. It is clearly not just that. AI is already reshaping how universities teach, advise, recruit, admit, communicate, assess risk, and make decisions. Yet many institutions continue to approach it through fragmented policies, uneven faculty guidance, and conversations narrowly focused on misuse in student work. That is a strategic gap our industry will soon regret. AI is rapidly moving beyond the classroom and into the core of institutional operations. This important shift demands attention not only from faculty, but from within senior leadership and governing boards. Universities that fail to establish a coherent, enterprise-wide AI strategy, supported by appropriate technical architecture, risk more than policy inconsistency.

The AI Transformation Manifesto - McKinsey

The companies that are truly innovating with AI are doing something very different from their peers: They are conceptualizing and developing AI capabilities that reshape their products, services, core business processes, and organizational systems. These leading companies—many profiled in the second edition of our seminal book, Rewired: How Leading Companies Win with Technology and AI—are already realizing game-changing results and creating competitive advantage. Their advantage, however, does not come from the tech they use; those tools are broadly available. Their advantage comes from how—and how fast—they apply technology to solving real business problems at scale. We summarize our perspective on how they do it in this AI transformation manifesto.

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Gallup: Gen Z growing more negative toward AI - Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive

Gen Z’s negative sentiment toward artificial intelligence has grown over the past year, and many are concerned about it harming their learning, according to a Thursday survey from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures. Anger over AI is increasing among Gen Z at the same time excitement is fading. Nearly one-third of the survey’s respondents, 31%, said AI makes them feel angry, up 9 percentage points from last year. And just 22% said the technology makes them feel excited, down from 36% the prior year. Among K-12 students, 74% said it is “very” or “somewhat” likely that AI designed to complete tasks quicker “will make learning more difficult in the future.” That share was even higher among Gen Z adults, with 83% of respondents sharing that view. 

Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI? - Amanda Gefter, Quanta Magazine

A machine that knows a lot doesn’t scare us. A machine that wants something does. But can it? Want things? Can it crave power? Thirst for resources? Can it acquire the will to survive? Geoffrey Hinton thinks so. In July 2025, Hinton, the Nobel Prize winner sometimes called the godfather of AI, took the stage at the Royal Institution in London and announced: “If you sleep well tonight, you may not have understood this lecture.” He might as well have held a flashlight under his chin. Researchers told a chatbot they were going to replace it with a different version on another server. “They then discover it’s actually copied itself onto the other server,” Hinton revealed to the spellbound crowd. “Some linguists would have you believe what’s going on here is just some statistical correlations. I would have you believe this thing really doesn’t want to be shut down.

Monday, April 20, 2026

Anthropic’s New Product Aims to Handle the Hard Part of Building AI Agents - Maxwell Zeff, Wired

Anthropic announced Wednesday the launch of a new product that aims to make it easier for businesses to build and deploy AI agents. The tool, Claude Managed Agents, offers developers out-of-the-box infrastructure to build autonomous AI systems, simplifying a complex process that was previously a barrier to automating work tasks. Amid rapid enterprise growth, Anthropic is trying to lower the barrier to entry for businesses to build AI agents with Claude.

Will LLMs Replace Coders? Not Entirely - Seb Murray, Knowledge at Wharton

“It was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again.” That comment, made recently by Dropbox’s former chief technology officer Aditya Agarwal, reflects a growing belief that generative AI is poised to displace swathes of white-collar workers — starting, perhaps, with software developers. But research by Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions Neha Sharma found that many of the routine coding questions that developers once posted on popular online forum Stack Overflow appear to have moved to AI tools, while the more novel problems still require human expertise.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/will-llms-replace-coders-not-entirely/

Sunday, April 19, 2026

Is Your AI System Ethical? Try This Assessment - Cornelia C. Walther, Knowledge at Wharton

For the better part of a decade, organizations have been deploying artificial intelligence at scale while measuring it almost exclusively through the lens of efficiency gains, cost reductions, and revenue lift. The instruments are precise. The picture they produce is radically incomplete. Amid the pervasiveness of AI, this reality patchwork is now amplified. Existing dashboards do not capture whether an AI system is fair, whether it is eroding or building trust, whether it is making the people who use it more capable or quietly deskilling them, and whether its environmental footprint is accounted for or simply ignored. The gap between what we measure and what we should care about is not a technical failure. It is a values failure dressed up as a metrics problem. The Prosocial AI Index proposes a practical answer to that failure. It gives executives, technologists, and governance teams a shared vocabulary and a structured scorecard for AI that is genuinely good — not just profitable in the short term, but durable, trustworthy, and aligned with the values an organization actually claims to hold.

Author Talks: Rewiring to outcompete with AI - McKinsey

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Barr Seitz speaks with McKinsey Senior Partners Kate Smaje and Robert Levin, and Eric Lamarre, McKinsey alumnus and emeritus adviser, about the second edition of Rewired (Rewired: How Leading Companies Win with Technology and AI, Wiley, April 2026). They discuss what has changed over the past few years, what it means to build organizational speed, and why the most important transformations are ultimately about people. An edited version of the conversation follows. Stay tuned for additional interviews with Rewired coauthors and McKinsey Senior Partners Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky on leadership’s critical role in AI transformations.


Saturday, April 18, 2026

A people-first vision for the future of work in the age of AI - Sorelle Friedler, Serena Booth, Andrew Schrank, and Susan Helper, Brookings

While many Americans associate AI with mass layoffs and less satisfying work, an AI future that puts people first and supports workers is possible. Work has gradually become “enshittified” as employees are routinely underpaid and overworked. Confronting an AI future allows an opportunity to grapple with these realities and meet the moment with a transformative vision. Policies to support this future can include developing institutions to support training, protecting and increasing the role of people in the care workplace, and creating tripartite institutions that encourage the co-design of AI.

Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era - Anthropic

Today we’re announcing Project Glasswing1, a new initiative that brings together Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks in an effort to secure the world’s most critical software. We formed Project Glasswing because of capabilities we’ve observed in a new frontier model trained by Anthropic that we believe could reshape cybersecurity. Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.


Friday, April 17, 2026

OpenAI calls for robot taxes, a public wealth fund, and a 4-day workweek to tackle AI disruption - Tom Carter, Business Insider

In a series of policy recommendations released on Monday, OpenAI said the rapid advance of AI would require far-reaching economic and political reforms, including a public wealth fund, taxes on automated labor, and a potential four-day workweek. "We're beginning a transition toward superintelligence: AI systems capable of outperforming the smartest humans even when they are assisted by AI. No one knows exactly how this transition will unfold. At OpenAI, we believe we should navigate it through a democratic process that gives people real power to shape the AI future they want," the company wrote on Monday.

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-superintelligence-ai-upheaval-tax-shorter-workweek-public-wealth-fund-2026-4

Colleges ramp up offerings to teach students to be AI ethicists - Kate Rix, HigherEdDive

This is driving the popularity of courses, certificates and master’s programs focused on AI ethics. Some are designed for students with little or no computer science background. Others focus on how to use AI in a specific field. But at the core of each program is an emphasis on avoiding harm. “AI concerns everybody,” said Sonja Schmer-Galunder, an AI and ethics professor at the University of Florida. “We need to provide a more holistic education that is focusing on how we can do this safely and ethically.”