Chattanooga, Tennessee, a midsize Southern city, is on no one’s list of artificial intelligence hot spots.
But as the technology’s use moves beyond a few big city hubs and is more widely adopted across the economy, Chattanooga and other once-struggling cities in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and South are poised to be among the unlikely winners, a recent study found.
The shared attributes of these metropolitan areas include an educated workforce, affordable housing and workers who are mostly in occupations and industries less likely to be replaced or disrupted by AI, according to the study by two labor economists, Scott Abrahams, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, and Frank Levy, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These cities are well positioned to use AI to become more productive, helping to draw more people to those areas…