Platformer: “Brookings Institution researcher Molly Kinder on why she’s leaving her job to create solution for AI’s “messy middle.” Molly Kinder has spent the past three years at the Brookings Institution leading a multiyear project on how generative AI is transforming work. In a recent widely discussed essay, she predicted the coming of what she calls the “messy middle:” a long, hard period between the mostly intact labor market we see today (which she calls “reality 1” and the post-AGI abundance that Silicon Valley promises to someday deliver (“reality 3”). In the messy middle — “reality 2” — most jobs will survive, but losses will be concentrated in some of the best-paid, most coveted jobs in the economy. Whatever happens next, Kinder argues, we should expect those concentrated losses to be “politically explosive.” After all, Kinder told me, the workers most at risk in the near future are the ones who fared best in earlier waves of automation: the laptop class. “If you can do your job locked in a closet with a computer, eventually you’re probably going to be in trouble,” Kinder says. It’s a striking inversion of the pandemic, when the people who could work from home were the safest — and the essential workers who couldn’t were the most exposed…”