MAGA Republicans side with progressives on key issue

WASHINGTON – The populist wing of the Republican Party is beginning to worry that its embrace of artificial intelligence and its efforts to shield the tech industry from regulation could backfire and lead to massive job losses that will empower billionaires over the working class.

The warnings from prominent voices within the MAGA world about AI adoption come as President Donald Trump works to aggressively expand the industry in a high-stakes race against China. The president this week tidy The country’s scientific agencies will implement AI as part of a broader government effort to remove regulatory barriers for the industry. His administration is also reportedly considering issuing a controversial executive order That would restrict AI regulation to individual states that are tired of waiting for Congress to act.

“I don’t think we’re doing enough to protect workers,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who opposes a moratorium on state regulation, said in an interview with News themezone. “We need to do more because I’m sure Silicon Valley will get rich off of this… But what about blue-collar workers in my state?”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s MAGA whisperer and longtime ally, went so far as to call AI probably “the most dangerous technology in human history.”

“I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said last week on his show “The War Room.” “This is not capitalism. This is corporatism and crony capitalism.” the later told ABC News that without proper safeguards, AI could lead to a “jobs apocalypse” that would harm workers, including many Trump supporters.

Some MAGA Republicans are also uncomfortable with the construction of huge data centers pushing AI or the idea of ​​preventing states from regulating the industry, opposing the Trump administration’s efforts to include it in major legislation this year.

“Banning states from regulating AI for 10 years is a gift to Big Tech and a disaster for the rights of American workers and states,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who is retiring in January. saying after a moratorium on state regulation was removed from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year.

Julia Demaree Nikhinson via News

On this issue, MAGA populists are surprisingly aligned with progressive critics of AI. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has spent months warning to the public about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and robotics, noting that the world’s richest people like Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos stand to benefit the most from relying on automation, at the expense of the working-class people whose jobs it could replace.

“It will mean even more wealth and even more political power for these guys at the top, as our democracy grows weaker and weaker. Working people will see a significant decline in their standard of living unless we change this,” Sanders said. said NBC News.

Several technology companies in recent weeks have announced mass layoffs, prompting dual concerns from economists that the United States could be entering a recession and that AI has already become so useful that it is making workers redundant.

Dean Baker, senior economist at the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research, has noted that layoffs in the tech sector are relatively small compared to regular labor market turnover, which typically sees more than a million layoffs a month even in good times.

“The concern about mass unemployment seems crazy,” Baker told News themezone.

Baker noted that if AI were to increase worker productivity to the point of causing mass unemployment, it would also substantially boost broader economic growth and substantially improve the government’s fiscal outlook.

“If your concern has been mass unemployment, then you should also think about those other things [are true]and I don’t hear many people say that,” Baker said. “Those would go together.”

Still, Baker believes the labor market is weakening along with a stock bubble inflated by technology that could cause a painful recession in the near future. Trump’s allies in Silicon Valley, such as his cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence czar, David Sacks, are already urging investors not to take their foot off the accelerator of companies like Nvidia.

“According to today’s WSJ, AI-related investment accounts for half of GDP growth,” Sacks wrote on social media. mail. “A reversal would risk a recession. We cannot afford to go backwards.”

Other experts, including AI industry leaders and researchers, have warned of the wide range of risks associated with artificial intelligence and have called for government intervention and stricter security protocols.

“People who lose their jobs won’t have jobs to go to,” Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate known as the “godfather of AI” for his work in neural networks, told Sanders at an event last week on the risks of AI at Georgetown University. “If AI becomes as smart as people, or smarter, any job they can do can be done by AI.”

AI-related job losses could be particularly severe among entry-level workers, who are experiencing above average Unemployment rates after the COVID-19 pandemic.

via News

“I think we’re facing massive unemployment in entry-level skills jobs, and what we’re asked to do here is encourage that,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview with News themezone. “I think AI has tremendous potential, but we need to be clear about its core selling proposition. [and] how disruptive it is and how many more benefits they will get. How do they make all those new profits? By not having to hire people.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) predicted that unemployment among recent college graduates could rise from 9% to 20-25%, while Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a former attorney, said young people looking to enter the legal profession could be affected.

“It won’t affect blue-collar workers, you know, you can’t use AI to fix a sink,” he said. “But for many professional workers, it will have an impact. I understand it’s already having an impact on coders.”

Congress has only just begun to grapple with AI and its ramifications. While lawmakers have introduced legislation and held hearings on various aspects of the industry, they are still far from reaching a consensus on a nationwide federal regulatory standard. Under the Biden administration, a group of bipartisan senators led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) in 2023 released a roadmap for AI that was intended to guide policymakers as they craft bills to address it. That effort has largely gone nowhere under Trump, as most Republicans have followed his lead in advancing the industry, dismissing concerns about weaknesses.

“Any new technology is going to be disruptive,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) told News themezone. “This will be an extraordinarily disruptive technology. But I’m also very optimistic about the productivity gains we’re going to experience.”

Policymakers are also alarmed by the intelligence and national security implications of AI adoption. Recently, a Chinese state-sponsored group Used AI launch a cyberattack against global financial companies and government agencies, the first documented case of a large-scale AI cyberattack without substantial human intervention.

“Guys, wake up. This will destroy us, sooner than we think, if we don’t make AI regulation a national priority tomorrow,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). warned after the attack.