What if the AI boom never turns a profit?

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**Megan McCarty Carino** (0:31)
Where the rubber meets AI. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
An AI future could bring major economic disruption, including job loss. And fewer paychecks can mean less federal tax revenue. Experts say now is the time to rethink that system for the age of AI. Marketplace's Future Effects correspondent, David Brancaccio, went to Akron, Ohio, once the rubber capital of the world, to see what an earlier tech transformation might tell us about the AI transition ahead.

**David Brancaccio** (1:17)
Technology does not always take us to a better place. Ask the members of the famed New Wave band out of Akron, Ohio in the 1970s.
I'm a mechanical man from the band Devo for De-Evolution.

**David Giffels** (1:33)
What looks like progress, technological progress, economic progress, might not be human progress.

**David Brancaccio** (1:40)
David Giffels, English professor and co-author of Wheels of Fortune, The Story of Rubber in Akron, we're talking next to a brick wall of what used to be Bridgestone Tires world headquarters in the center of that city. Bridgestone, Firestone, Good Year, Good Rich, General Tire, all here, producing dreadful air quality, but good union jobs, that is until...

**David Giffels** (2:02)
In our book, there's a Firestone executive who just says flatly the radial tire is the reason that rubber left Akron.

**David Brancaccio** (2:09)
New technology, a better tire, the radial tire out of Europe wins over consumers.

**David Giffels** (2:15)
These first wave of these lasted 40,000 miles.

**David Brancaccio** (2:18)
An Akron factory like this one was set up to make the more balloon-like bias ply tires that lasted only half as long and did fewer miles per gallon.

**David Giffels** (2:28)
That single innovation had a triggering effect that devastated an entire town's industry and industrial identity and economic might.

**Megan McCarty Carino** (2:39)
We'll be right back.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:42)
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**Megan McCarty Carino** (4:46)
You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino. We're back with Marketplace's Future Effects correspondent, David Brancaccio.

**David Brancaccio** (4:55)
Right next to Akron proper is the small town of Barberton. A collection of smaller businesses now occupy what's left of the big tire factory which closed in 1980
Back then, the local paper conveyed the news of the city forced to freeze hiring.

**SPEAKER_6** (5:11)
To cut costs in the wake of the closing of the Cyberling Tire and Rubber Company plant. The plant's closing has led to a loss of about $300,000 in income tax revenues. Akron Beacon Journal, March 1980