Tag Archives: AI and high-skilled labor

Out-of-Date: Academic Cooperation

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Mr. Trump noted in the summer of 2025  that “the United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,” which Joe Biden called “a defining technology of our era.” Universities help drive that race. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, has argued that the rate of AI progress may be such that “you need to prevent all of our secrets from going over to our adversaries and you need to lock down the labs.”

Thousands of Chinese citizens are working and studying in such labs….In AI specifically, nearly 40% of top-tier researchers at U.S. institutions are of Chinese origin. Beijing is aggressively cultivating American-educated and American-employed researchers via the Thousand Talents program.

Blindly embracing academic cooperation with a geopolitical rival is absurd. Nobody suggests we should train Iranian nuclear physicists or Russian ballistics engineers. The U.S. wouldn’t have been better off collaborating more with Nazi Germany in the 1930s or with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why make an exception for a nation dedicated to surpassing the U.S. in emerging technologies?

Excerpt from  Mike Gallagher, Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home, WSJ, Aug. 19, 2025

McKinsey Loves its Bots and Proud of It

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Companies have paid dearly for McKinsey’s human expertise for nearly a century, relying on the firm’s armies of consultants to synthesize complex information, crunch huge amounts of data and map out solutions to thorny business challenges. But what happens now that AI can do much of that analysis in a matter of minutes—and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck to boot?… McKinsey has reduced its head count…and rolled out roughly 12,000 AI agents. These bots now assist consultants in building PowerPoint decks, taking notes and summing up interviews and research documents for clients.

Traditionally, a strategy project might have required a project leader, four consultants and a partner. Today, it might need a leader and two or three consultants—alongside a few AI agents and access to “deep research” capabilities. Bob Sternfels, head of McKinsey, said he sees a day in the not-too-distant future when McKinsey has one AI agent for every human it employs. “We’re going to continue to hire, but we’re also going to continue to build AI agents,” he said. 

Excerpt from Conor Grant, AI Comes for Consulting, McKinsey Faces an “Existential” Shift, WSJ, Aug. 8, 2025