Joe Wilkins

Joe Wilkins writes about how technology concentrates power and reshapes everyday life, treating AI, infrastructure, platforms, and speculative assets as the machinery of an already dystopian present. His work for Futurism follows the money, policy, and governance around emerging technologies, with recurring attention to labor, transit systems, and the ways ordinary people are exposed to risk in tech-driven markets, including crypto. Across his recent pieces he returns to the same question: who gains and who loses when technical systems and financial hype become the backbone of the economy.

Technology and Power as “Actually Existing Dystopia”

Wilkins frames his beat as the intersection of technology and power, examining the economics, history, and politics behind “today’s dystopian headlines.” He presents “actually existing dystopia” as his lens on Futurism, signalling a focus on real-world harms rather than speculative sci‑fi futures.

That perspective runs through pieces on the national economy’s dependence on an AI industry he describes as a bubble, where a single sector’s fortunes threaten broader economic stability. In coverage of generative AI and digital platforms, he shows how streaming services and recommendation systems strip musicians of income, reducing creative work to fractions of pennies while opaque algorithms decide what gets heard. He writes on surveillance technologies and computing infrastructure as part of the same continuum, treating sensors, data centers, and software not as neutral tools but as systems that embed power imbalances into everyday environments.

The tone is direct and unsentimental, built from clear headlines that tie abstract technologies to concrete social outcomes such as unemployment, financial precarity, and loss of autonomy.

Artificial Intelligence, Labor, and the Economy

AI’s impact on work and economic security is one of Wilkins’ most consistent threads. He writes about warnings that AI will destroy millions of white‑collar jobs in the near term, linking those projections to a surge in personal bankruptcies and the fragility of middle‑class livelihoods.

In his reporting on “AI native” college graduates, he highlights how students entering the workforce with heavy reliance on AI tools risk being functionally illiterate in professional settings, creating a mismatch between credentials and actual skills. Another Futurism story follows testimony from a former Google chief executive who tells lawmakers that a vast share of future electricity use could be diverted to superintelligent AI, underscoring how resource allocation in an AI‑centric economy can crowd out other public needs. Wilkins also covers research showing that cancer‑diagnosis AI systems can infer patients’ race from medical images and then behave in racially biased ways, connecting cutting‑edge medical technologies to entrenched discrimination.

These AI‑focused articles are usually framed as future society or health and medicine stories, but they remain grounded in labor, inequality, and the distribution of risk and reward.

Infrastructure, Transit, and Governance

Alongside AI, Wilkins maintains a transit and infrastructure beat, describing himself as a tech and transit correspondent whose coverage includes transportation networks and the physical and bureaucratic systems that support them. He writes about energy, transportation, and computing infrastructure as sites where policy, business decisions, and governance intersect, showing how technical upgrades or failures have social and economic consequences far beyond engineering. In this work he follows emerging technologies into public systems, tracking how surveillance tools, automation, and data platforms reshape transit operations and the labor conditions of workers who keep those systems running.

His pieces often sit at the boundary between technology reporting and political economy, attentive to who controls infrastructure, who benefits from its modernization, and who bears the risks when things go wrong.

Crypto, Speculation, and Populist Politics

Wilkins’ crypto coverage fits into this larger interest in speculative technology and unequal outcomes. In a recent Futurism piece on Trump supporters who bought into the former president’s branded crypto tokens and stock, he shows how retail investors’ holdings can collapse to a fraction of their previous value while the political figure associated with the assets grows richer.[anchor] The story treats crypto not as a technical curiosity but as an instrument of political branding and financial extraction, with everyday backers left confused by the gap between their losses and Trump’s gains.[anchor] Read against his broader work on the AI bubble and platform capitalism, this crypto reporting extends his concern with how hype‑driven markets and charismatic leaders shift risk onto ordinary participants. Together, these threads mark Wilkins as a reporter who uses tech stories - from AI to transit to crypto - to map power, economic vulnerability, and the lived experience of “future society” under already‑existing technological regimes.