Josh Tyrangiel ’90: AI and the Future of Work
The Atlantic’s March 2026 Cover Story by Josh Tyrangiel, Park School Class of 1990
Josh Tyrangiel is a staff writer at The Atlantic. A 12-time Emmy Award-winning producer, he created Vice News Tonight on HBO and has made films for HBO, Netflix, and more. His book, AI For Good, will be published by Simon & Schuster on May 12, 2026.
I’ve spent most of the past few months thinking about work. Not career work—the LinkedIn kind—but the deeper, older thing: the way people attach meaning and dignity to what they do all day. The ways work shapes their identities and their relationship to the world. And what happens when something very smart shows up and starts doing parts of that work faster, cheaper, and with unsettling competence.
So, yes, I wrote an AI story — but one that’s 1) mostly about humans and 2) tries to get past both the breathless “AI will save us from all drudgery” and the equally lazy “robots are coming for your job tomorrow.” It’s really about the uncomfortable middle: a technology arriving fast enough to scramble institutions that are very bad at moving fast.
The reporting took me from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—one of the quiet miracles of American democracy—to economists who argue that the data can’t yet see what’s coming, to others who think that’s precisely the problem. I spoke with CEOs who have gone conspicuously silent; politicians on both ends of the ideological horseshoe (and in the middle); union leaders, central bankers, and people who worry that the real danger isn’t mass unemployment so much as what happens before we agree it’s happening.
The piece isn’t a prediction. It’s an attempt to measure uncertainty—and to ask whether a democracy that increasingly struggles to agree on basic facts is equipped for a shock that may arrive faster than the numbers can capture.
If you’re interested in AI, work, economics, politics, or the uneasy feeling that we’re speeding into the future while staring at the rearview mirror, I’d love for you to read it—it’s The Atlantic’s March cover—and let me know what you think.
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