Crashing Waves vs Rising Tides: Preliminary Findings on AI Automation from Thousands of Worker Evaluations of Labor Market Tasks
The study behind the book’s rising-tide metaphor. Across thousands of real workplace tasks, AI capability spread steadily rather than arriving as one clean wave that could be watched from shore.
Cited in
Mertens, Kuzee, Harris, Lyu, Li, Rosenfeld, Anto, Fleming, Thompson. 'Crashing Waves vs Rising Tides: Preliminary Findings on AI Automation from Thousands of Worker Evaluations of Labor Market Tasks.' MIT FutureTech, April 2026. arxiv.org/html/2604.01363v1