The prophet of the ‘Wired Belt’ says capitalism is finally eating itself

Call it AI-washing if you like. CEOs worried about their own jobs certainly have an incentive to hide behind the narrative. You may also argue that AI will create new jobs — I’ve made that case myself. But the system is currently destroying value faster than it is creating it, and it is destroying it in precisely the places business can least afford: what I call the Wired Belt.

At my research center, Digital Planet at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, we built the American AI Jobs Risk Index — the first index to assess vulnerabilities spanning 784 occupations across all industries and regions in the U.S. Our finding: 9.3 million jobs and $757 billion in annual income at risk within five years. The most vulnerable occupations read like a C-suite dependency list — management analysts facing 30.8% projected displacement; computer programmers, 55.2%; financial analysts, 24.8%. These are not warehouse workers or call center agents. These are the people your business runs on.

But here is what no one else was saying when we started this work — and what the data now confirms: it’s the geography that makes this a systemic crisis, not just a labor story.

The disruption will be felt most in the Wired Belt: knowledge-economy metros from Raleigh-Durham to Boston that face 3.6x the job loss and 5.2x the income loss of the Rust Belt cities that defined the last era of displacement. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara tops the list at 9.9% of jobs at risk. Even Lexington Park, Maryland — a defense-contracting town few have heard of — ranks higher than San Francisco and Boston in its proportion of at-risk jobs. Ten metros alone account for 38 percent of all projected AI-driven income loss. These are not peripheral places. They are the engine rooms of American capitalism.

This Is Where Capitalism Starts Eating Itself

The self-defeating logic is almost elegant in its brutality. Businesses concentrated their highest-value talent and best customers in Wired Belt hubs — because that is what rational capitalism told them to do. Now the same AI investment those businesses are funding is about to hollow out the workforce and consumer base they depend on. Companies selling into these affluent metro economies can expect labor volatility accompanied by weaker spending. The goose is being asked to lay a golden egg and then be cooked with it.

The Wired Belt will also become a political battlefield — a different kind of disruption tax on business. States with high vulnerability are already legislating on AI four times as actively as AI-safe states, while a December 2025 federal executive order instructs the Justice Department to challenge state-led AI laws. The collision between aggressive state legislatures and federal preemption is a litigation environment no CFO has priced into their five-year plan. And there will be backlash — not the unfocused anger of displaced manufacturing workers in 1985, but the precise, digitally-organized fury of white-collar professionals who know exactly who to blame and how to find them.

Third — and this is the part that should unsettle any long-range strategist — the geographies of AI-driven destruction and creation will not be the same. The automobile created jobs in Detroit but destroyed the horse-drawn buggy industry in Cincinnati and Amesbury, Massachusetts. Nobody in Cincinnati got a heads-up. New AI-created economies will realign the centers of talent and affluence, and the companies that do not map that transition now will find themselves anchored to the wrong cities at the wrong time.

What Rational Capitalism Now Requires

There is still time to act rationally. Here is what that looks like:

Tracking: Conduct a Labor Impact Assessment for AI before a bipartisan bill in Congress compels you to. Map your workforce, revenue sources, and key relationships by metro against AI-exposure scores. Find the overlap between your highest-value locations and the highest-displacement metros. That overlap is your liability register.

Hedging: Columbus, Nashville, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, and Indianapolis offer lower displacement exposure, lower cost structures, and growing AI-adjacent skill bases. Build them into your post-AI talent portfolio now, not after the Wired Belt shakes.

Re-thinking: Use AI deployment as an opportunity to redesign work — not just reduce headcount. Task-level impact reviews. Human judgment preserved for consequential decisions. Bias testing before rollout. The companies that skip this step will face the regulatory and reputational costs later.

Partnering: Collaborate with AI companies for real-time visibility into how tools affect roles and tasks. Co-invest with local governments and universities in the most affected communities. This is not altruism — it is supply chain management for your future workforce.

Sharing: Wage increases for workers who stay. Portable retraining accounts for workers you displace. Workforce-impact disclosure in proxy statements. The companies that do this will win the talent war in Wired Belt metros. The ones that don’t will face a constituency that is digitally fluent, increasingly angry, and not interested in a town hall meeting.

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I built this index because I believed the threat was real and the geography mattered. The data confirmed both. The companies that recognize their highest-performing offices may be their most fragile ones will still be standing when AI redraws the map. The rest will have their business prospects redrawn for them — by their displaced workers, their customers, their state attorneys general, and eventually their shareholders. And unlike the last time capitalism ate a generation of workers, these stakeholders will not be gathering in a diner in Lorain, Ohio. They are on LinkedIn — organized, credentialed, and already drafting the post.

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