If we focus on generative AI, then I expect that there will be a lot of positive implications for the workers currently residing in cities. There will be a challenge to make sure that some of that economic benefit trickles down to workers in rural areas. This is because a lot of the work for tech companies or the work with data—the work that would be involved in innovating generative AI technologies but also benefiting from the tools you can build with these AI tools—is done by workers who tend to be in cities.
The access to data and computing and these AI services also requires a lot of infrastructure. For example, access to high-speed internet is, of course, abundant in cities. It's better and better in rural communities, but it is not great everywhere. This is just one basic way to see that, even if the brightest minds were living in the most rural communities, there could still be infrastructural barriers in their way.