I went to a Fourth of July party where almost everyone was a millennial with a family, a nice house in Seattle and a good job. And pretty much everyone I talked with had an uneasy feeling that artificial intelligence could seriously undermine their happy lives.
This is the biggest political issue that no politician is talking about. While members of Congress yammer about restoring manufacturing jobs as if this were 1955, not 2025, white collar jobs are being taken over by AI at a rapidly increasing pace.
If elected officials are not talking about it, some business leaders are. In a recent interview cited in The Wall Street Journal, Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley said, “Artificial Intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has told employees that the corporate workforce will shrink in coming years because of AI technology. Already at Microsoft, the shift of focus to AI appears to be leading to layoffs.
News reports indicate entry-level positions at many tech companies are being taken over by AI, leaving out in the cold many new college graduates who have dutifully followed the STEM track they were told would lead to great jobs.
AI boosters insist this is just like past technological changes that eliminated old jobs but created new ones, but AI is a very different phenomenon and none of the Pollyannas can actually name what those new jobs might be. Besides, AI is not eliminating old jobs, it is taking them.
The one thing that is certain is that AI will create vast fortunes for companies that no longer need to hire humans. The political question is whether all that wealth will go to a lucky few billionaires or be seen as a societal benefit to be shared by all citizens in the way that Alaska has shared revenue from the state’s oil bonanza with every state resident.
A lot of politicians will scream “socialism” at the idea of sharing the wealth, but how else are they going to deal with millions of highly educated people who can no longer find work?
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