For years now, experts have been warning that AI automation could lead to huge numbers of people losing their jobs.
Whether those fears will come to fruition is still a matter of debate as even the most advanced AI continues to struggle with persistent issues around accuracy and reasoning.
But what's becoming increasingly clear is that, among tech leaders, the vision for the industry is that it will displace large numbers of workers — a prospect we're already seeing hints of as tech giants invest heavily in the tech while laying off thousands.
A related ideology is on display as Donald Trump megadonor Elon Musk has been ransacking the federal government, laying off thousands of workers.
Add it all up, and representative Bernie Sanders (D-VT) is warning that the rise of AI combined with Musk's despotic management style could result in a toxic attack on workers that remakes society around the interests of billionaires.
"Think about it for a moment," Sanders said in a video response to Trump's Congressional address on Tuesday night. "If Musk and his friends can arbitrarily throw federal workers out on the street today, what do you think that Musk and his fellow billionaires will be doing tomorrow when artificial intelligence and robotics explode in this country?"
"Do you think they'll give a damn about you and your families?" he added. "No, they will treat you exactly the way they're treating federal employees today. You will be out on the street as well."
According to the latest numbers, the US labor market is in dire straits. Employers announced over 172,000 layoffs last month, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas — the highest level in almost five years. A third of those layoffs came directly from DOGE.
The forecast is grim. Total job losses are expected to top half a million people by the end of 2025, as Bloomberg reports, which could have catastrophic effects on the economy as a whole.
Such a big wave in unemployment could have disastrous effects on the economy, and the reality is that AI has barely started to scratch the surface of the outsize promises of its boosters.
Sanders' comments resonate, in other words. The vindictiveness with which Musk has been plundering federal agencies has closely resembled the way he treats workers at his own businesses as well, where he's garnered a reputation for being a "horrible boss" who incessantly cracks the whip, forces his workers to sleep on the factory floor, and threatens them with firing if they don't work overtime.
Even the AI part isn't a stretch. Musk's DOGE has already started applying AI tools to analyze government spending and fed highly sensitive data extracted from the Education Department into a similar system.
So it's alarming to think of that dictatorial philosophy spreading even further at the exact moment that the capabilities of AI are coming in strong.
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