The tech companies have ideas. In early April, OpenAI — whose most cheery prediction says 18 percent of jobs will soon be automated — rolled out a plan for a “New Deal” for workers: a 32-hour workweek, a public wealth fund, a tax on capital gains. On the moderate end, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei admitted that AI job disruption was “a macroeconomic problem [so] large” it may require a whole new tax code — with a duty levied “against AI companies in particular.” But while the country’s two leading AI companies talk about a dramatically different landscape for the American worker, Congress has been largely silent.

Maybe it was holding off for hard data. Until recently, the stories of vast displacement by AI were mostly anecdotal and met with skepticism. When Amodei told Axios last year that AI could “wipe out nearly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs,” one couldn’t help noticing the statement helped his company’s valuation. And when former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey laid off more than 4,000 staff at his new firm, Block, citing AI, critics were quick to point out artificial intelligence was just as likely a convenient excuse to fire people without having to fess up to bad hiring or poor profits.

The mood, however, is starting to shift. In March, Goldman Sachs issued a report that about 7 percent of workers will be displaced by AI. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that 2025 ended with the highest unemployment rate for recent college grads in years. Yes, another recent report challenged the “AI-job-apocalypse narrative” — but this one from MIT did so mainly on speed: “2027 is too aggressive an estimate for AI to broadly eclipse the performance of human workers,” a statement on the data said. “AI will achieve 80 percent success rates on most tasks by 2029.” (So much better.)

Even if a politician doubts we are headed to AI hell, one would think self-survival would push forward some bold proposals. Seventy-one percent of workers in one recent poll say they are afraid of job displacement from this technology. Pro-AI PACs like Leading the Future are already dumping millions into the midterm elections. Clearly, the companies are worried something could be done by those in government. (It’s doubtful the millions are actually being used to push OpenAI’s “New Deal.”)

We asked five members of the political class who have been vocal regarding AI about their colleagues’ relative silence. What are politicians saying behind closed doors? And why isn’t there a big plan to deal with AI from D.C.? — Jacob Rosenberg

The Political Backlash Has Already Started

Bharat Ramamurti, a top economist under Biden who has publicly warned that the Democratic Party is not talking about the likely “biggest economic issue in the 2028 presidential election.”

I thought that policymakers at alllevels, especially the federal level, would be eager to jump in on this issue because it’s likely to be the defining one of the next decade. This is not personal computing; it’s not like electricity. The entire purpose of this technology is to replace human intelligence and human labor.

I’ve made the analogy to the “China shock,” which totally changed manufacturing in the United States. The China shock led to significant job losses and political realignment. But the potential job losses from AI are five times that and therefore have the potential to be even more transformative to our politics. The 2028 election is likely to center on the impact of AI on the country — and two competing visions for how to deal with it — in the way that COVID really shaped the 2020 election.

Part of my obsession after spending three years in the Biden administration is that you can’t just look at a chart of the economy and say, “Well, real inflation-adjusted median household income has improved, which means that people’s lives are getting better and they’re happy.” The economy is much more complicated than that, and there are these feelings about uncertainty, autonomy, fairness: “Why is it that this is being taken away from me and I see a bunch of other people around me who are seemingly at random getting really rich, but I can’t get ahead?”

When you talk to Democrats, a lot........

© Daily Intelligencer