{"id":224796,"date":"2026-03-17T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/17\/ai-is-reshaping-boulders-economy-our-candidates-arent-talking-about-it\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T00:05:32","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T04:05:32","slug":"ai-is-reshaping-boulders-economy-our-candidates-arent-talking-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/17\/ai-is-reshaping-boulders-economy-our-candidates-arent-talking-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"AI is reshaping Boulder’s economy. Our candidates aren\u2019t talking about it"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI is reshaping Boulder’s economy. Our candidates aren\u2019t talking about it<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/boulderreportinglab.org\/2026\/03\/17\/aquiles-la-grave-ai-is-reshaping-boulders-economy-our-candidates-arent-talking-about-it\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-03-17 23:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: boulderreportinglab.org<\/a><\/p>\n

This commentary is by Aquiles La Grave, a Boulder-based business owner who served as a delegate at the 2026 Colorado Democratic assembly.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a clip of David Bowie from the late 1990s that\u2019s been circulating again. A reporter asks him whether people are making too much of the internet. Bowie pauses, then reminds the reporter that hype cycles happen every generation. A hundred years earlier, a U.S. president predicted a day when every American town would have a telephone.<\/p>\n

Classic Bowie. Classic reporter. Classic mistake.<\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence is not another tech cycle. It is not being overhyped. If anything, it is being radically underhyped. Because the real pattern with technological revolutions is not excitement. It is complacency.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t shake the feeling that many of us look a lot like the British aristocracy in the late 19th century. Industrialization had already reorganized the economy. Cities were filling. Agricultural labor was collapsing. The engine of wealth had moved. Yet the people sitting on top of the old order behaved as if the structure underneath them hadn\u2019t changed.<\/p>\n

The orchestra had stopped. No one bothered putting out chairs.<\/p>\n

I kept returning to that word \u201ccomplacency\u201d last Saturday as I sat as a delegate at the Boulder County Democratic assembly. For hours, I listened to candidates and surrogates make their cases across a range of races. The overwhelming theme was experience, endorsements, and relationships. Who had served longest. Who was best liked. Who had the most impressive list of supporters.<\/p>\n

Few, and that\u2019s to say almost no one, mentioned artificial intelligence. Almost no one talked about what it is already doing to the labor market, to entry-level hiring, to the structure of the organizations that employ the people in their districts. The silence was deafening.<\/p>\n

One local candidate, a CU regent candidate at that, did make it the center of his message. One. Out of an entire convention\u2019s…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AI is reshaping Boulder’s economy. Our candidates aren\u2019t talking about it https:\/\/boulderreportinglab.org\/2026\/03\/17\/aquiles-la-grave-ai-is-reshaping-boulders-economy-our-candidates-arent-talking-about-it\/ Publish Date: 2026-03-17…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":224797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/boulderreportinglab.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/BRL_OpinionGraphic1.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224796"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224798,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224796\/revisions\/224798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}