The Most Joyless Tech Revolution Ever: AI Is Making Us Rich and Unhappy (www.wsj.com)

A recent piece frames the current AI boom as doubly consequential: technologically transformative and emotionally corrosive. While investors and corporations celebrate surging productivity, IPOs and efficiency gains, ordinary Americans reportedly respond with ambivalence, anxiety and even dread. The article argues that economic upside is real — AI is concentrating wealth and accelerating automation — but social and psychological benefits are lagging, leaving many to feel economically displaced and culturally unsettled. For the AI/ML community this split matters: technical progress no longer exists in a vacuum. Large-scale model deployment, automation of white‑collar tasks, and data‑driven decision systems bring immediate engineering challenges (robustness, bias mitigation, interpretability, and privacy) and societal implications (job displacement, concentration of power, and erosion of trust). The story underscores the need for human-centered design, clearer communication about capabilities and limits, stronger data governance, and policy engagement to ensure benefits are more widely shared. In short, the field’s technical advances must be paired with accountability, explainability and equitable rollout strategies if AI’s economic gains are to translate into broader social well‑being.