- The Point by Modern Sciences
- Posts
- The workplace bargain AI just broke, the ancient ritual behind your January goals, and why your city's trees might not be enough
The workplace bargain AI just broke, the ancient ritual behind your January goals, and why your city's trees might not be enough
The Point by Modern Sciences - July 8, 2026
Don Smith
July 08, 2026
By The Modern Sciences Team | July 8, 2026 |
It’s a new Wednesday, Cultivators of Curiosity!
Not everything that seems like progress is. This issue of The Point by Modern Sciences looks at three cases where the obvious solution turns out to be more complicated than it appears.
AI is automating junior work faster than anyone anticipated—and researchers are now asking what happens to expertise when the entry point disappears. New Year's resolutions feel like a modern self-improvement habit, but they turn out to be one of the oldest recorded human rituals, shaped by gods, debts, and knightly honor long before gym memberships existed. And cities around the world are spending billions planting trees to fight urban heat—only to find that in some climates, more greenery can actually make things worse. Welcome to Issue 26.
TECH
AI could mark the end of young people learning on the job – with terrible results
AI is quietly dismantling one of the most fundamental deals in the modern workplace: entry-level jobs that trade routine work for skills and mentorship. With junior positions in AI-exposed fields declining by roughly 20% since 2022, researchers warn of a growing training deficit that could hollow out entire industries, trap workers in dead-end paths, and leave organizations with no one to hand over to.
The Point:
AI is breaking a foundational workplace bargain that has existed for generations: Entry-level workers have always traded routine tasks for mentorship and skill development, but as AI automates that grunt work, junior positions in exposed fields are disappearing — and with them, the on-the-job learning that turns beginners into experts.
The long-term damage goes beyond individual careers: Research comparing career structures to trees shows that specialized skills only hold value when built on strong general foundations, and if AI cuts off access to those foundations at the entry level, workers become trapped in limited career paths while organizations are left with an aging workforce and no talent pipeline behind it.
The disruption is uneven and the solutions require deliberate effort from employers: Women face nearly three times the displacement risk of men due to their higher concentration in administrative roles, and researchers argue that employers must actively redesign rather than eliminate junior positions, prioritizing human interaction and judgment over screen-based tasks that AI can already do faster.
HISTORY
Where did the new year’s resolution come from? Well, we’ve been making them for 4,000 years
New Year's resolutions feel like a modern habit, but humans have been making them for at least 4,000 years. From the ancient Babylonians pledging debts to their gods during a 12-day festival to Roman sacrifices honoring the two-faced god Janus, the tradition of marking a new year with a promise of change is one of humanity's most enduring and universal rituals.
The Point:
New Year's resolutions are one of humanity's oldest recorded traditions, stretching back 4,000 years: The ancient Babylonians began the practice during their 12-day Akitu festival, pledging to repay debts and renew loyalty to their ruler in exchange for divine favor—a structure that made promises simultaneously religious, political, and economic in nature.
The tradition evolved through Roman ritual, medieval chivalry, and religious reformation before becoming secular: Julius Caesar's calendar reform locked January 1 as the New Year to honor the god Janus, Roman citizens offered sacrifices and pledged civic bonds, and medieval knights renewed vows of valor at a peacock ceremony—each culture reshaping the tradition to reflect its own values and power structures.
The impulse behind resolutions hasn't changed even as their content has: From Babylonian debt repayment to 19th-century Protestant moral pledges to today's fitness goals and lifestyle ambitions, the core mechanism remains the same: humans use the threshold of a new year as a symbolic fresh start, a moment to project their hopes for who they want to become.
EARTH
Trees and greenery can cool cities by as much as 18°C – but only if they’re the right type
Planting trees to cool cities sounds straightforward, but new research across Melbourne, Munich, and Hong Kong shows the reality is far more complex. Layered vegetation combining trees, shrubs, and ground cover consistently outperformed trees alone, while dense planting in humid cities sometimes made heat stress worse. The right greening strategy, it turns out, depends heavily on local climate and street design.
The Point:
Urban trees can dramatically reduce heat stress, but the way they are planted matters enormously: Field measurements in Melbourne showed street trees cutting radiant heat by over 18 degrees Celsius, while layered vegetation combining trees, shrubs, and ground cover consistently outperformed trees-only planting across all three cities studied.
The wrong greening strategy can make things worse, not better: In Hong Kong's humid climate, dense planting increased moisture in the air through transpiration, reducing the body's ability to cool itself through sweat evaporation, while in Munich some narrow streets saw trapped warm air and vehicle pollution when dense vegetation blocked airflow.
Cities need climate-smart, locally tailored green design rather than universal canopy targets: The research argues that measuring success by tree numbers alone misses the point: vegetation structure, street width, local humidity, and airflow all determine whether urban greening improves outdoor comfort or creates unintended consequences as global temperatures continue to rise.