Remote worker network grows from 15 to 300 members as automation reshapes industry
By Tim Rowland
Artificial Intelligence may complicate efforts to bring tech jobs to the Adirondacks, but ultimately it will facilitate technological advancement in the wilds of the park that never would have been possible before, according to Matt Dunne, founder and executive director of the Center on Rural Innovation.
“We have been spending the last six months really digging into AI and its implications for rural America, particularly in tech and tech business,” said Dunne. He was speaking at a gathering of tech workers in Lake Placid celebrating the first anniversary of the Adirondack Community Foundation’s Adirondack Innovation Initiative (A2I). The findings have revealed good news and bad.
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AI’s double-edged impact on rural tech
“It’s an extraordinary moment, and we believe that AI presents huge challenges for rural places, because (tech) jobs are automating really, really fast,” Dunne said.
Some of this automation is bound to affect A2I, which seeks to attract and connect tech workers in the Adirondack Park. Other outdoors-oriented communities such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, have had success in this arena, building meaningful workforces in areas that had historically depended on timber and mining for work.
The Adirondacks already had the makings of a tech community, but no organized way to connect. “When I started this project, we knew of about 15 remote workers,” said Svetlana Filipson, director of A2I. “Our network has now grown to about 300 and growing all the time.”
A2I provides the connections, social and professional, and also sets the table for tech workers in other cities who may find the Adirondack lifestyle appealing.
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These new job opportunities are crucial for the park, and need to be in place before other Adirondack challenges can be solved, said Craig Weatherup, a former PepsiCo executive who retired to the Adirondacks and founded A2I.
It is the good jobs that will create the demand necessary to make progress in housing, child care and other rural problems that have proved difficult to solve, he said.
RELATED READING: How tech innovation is revitalizing Adirondack communities
Rural America’s missing tech workforce
Those tech jobs are a mission of the Center on Rural Innovation, a nonprofit created in 2017 to support tech economies in rural areas, which have 12% of America’s workforce, but only 5% of its tech jobs.
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Dunne was elected to the Vermont State Legislature at age 22, and went on to a career that has included director of AmeriCorps VISTA under President Clinton, and as community relations manager for Google in White River Junction. The Center on Rural Innovation has successfully established tech hubs in rural localities across the country. Dunne said there are 80,000 “missing” tech jobs in rural America, some for reasons so simple that, say, a hospital in need of a cybersecurity specialist, never bothers to advertise the position locally.
With most of the park now wired for high-speed Internet, remote work is not only possible, but it may be the future, tech advocates believe. The pay is good, tech workers can enjoy a recreational lifestyle and it’s an option for local kids who want rewarding work in their home communities.
AI, however, has been swallowing tech jobs at a startling pace. Already, according to The Washington Post, a quarter of the code at Google and Microsoft is being written by AI. That can be an obvious threat to the dream of writing code from a chalet a few miles from a mountain bike trail.
AI could solve rural tech’s workforce and scaling challenges
At the same time, this automation has the potential to solve some of the stickiest problems facing the incubation of technology in rural areas. It’s been widely assumed, for example, that tech is impractical for rural areas because they lack the necessary workforce and knowledge. This has kept venture capital tightly tied to the cities. The Adirondacks see little private investment, even in comparison to rural Vermont, right across Lake Champlain.
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“AI has the potential to solve the two big knocks against rural places,” Dunne said. “The first knock is that you don’t have enough people for your company to be able to scale up once you get started. How are you going to hire the 500 front-end web developers overnight? And the other is, there’s not enough people with deep technical knowledge of all of these different areas, and you can’t even send them to a night program at MIT to be able to come up to speed on it, because they don’t have access to that.”
Instead of being dependent on city populations, a good idea can catch fire from anywhere, created by people known as “solopreneurs.”
“What AI provides is the opportunity for small teams to bring ideas to market super fast,” Dunne said. “It’s hard to overuse a superlative about how much agency it is giving individuals.”
Developing a web app, typically an expensive proposition taking a team of four to 10 trained tech workers, can now be accomplished by a single person chatting in narrative fashion on the website Loveable. That might be bad for the four to 10 tech workers, but good for an individual in the Adirondacks with no access to a team.
Furthermore, those with some tech expertise—even those in non-tech small businesses such as restaurants and contracting—can tap into large language AI models to exponentially increase their knowledge and productivity.
“That’s just a huge unlocking moment that I believe will solve so many of the problems for wealth creation and job creation,” Dunne said. “For rural folks, it’s not without its challenges. And for folks who are in technology fields—maybe my job is being eliminated because it’s not needed anymore—you’re seeing some reductions. But, you’re also seeing people then being able to take that agency and go and create their own thing, so that so many more people can become builders with ideas and innovation once they have access to this kind of skill.” More information on the A2I project and how to sign up as a mentor or mentee is available at Adirondack Community Foundation Innovation Initiative (A2I).
Photo at top: From left: Matt Dunne, founder and executive director of the Center on Rural Innovation, Svetlana Filipson, director of A2I, and Craig Weatherup, founder of A2I. Photo courtesy of Adirondack Community Foundation
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