America’s Next Rust Belt Could be its Most Digitally Connected Cities

According to an article by Juan Vasquez in WebProNews, “a new geography of economic vulnerability is forming in the United States, and it doesn’t look anything like the old one.”

As Vasquez explains, artificial intelligence threatens to upend the economies not of Midwestern factory towns, but that of “white-collar, digitally connected metro areas that were supposed to be the winners of the knowledge economy.”

These newly vulnerable regions are what researchers from Tufts University are calling “Wired Belts,” areas that could be vulnerable to AI-driven displacement. According to the researchers, “The states most at risk read like a roll call of American economic success: Washington, D.C., sits at the very top of the vulnerability index, followed by states like New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia. California, home to Silicon Valley, ranks high as well.”

The comparison with the Rust Belt is more than just a turn of phrase, Vasquez notes. It is a warning to take the challenges and opportunities of the rise of data centers and AI seriously — “before the map of AI vulnerability becomes a map of economic decline.”