Stop AI Before it's Too Late

Its costs and risks are gigantic. Its benefits, unproven.

I’m going to make a proposal today that’s almost certain to get me consigned to the neo-Luddite dustbin of history.

But first, let me lay out some facts.

Rather than producing jobs, the U.S. economy actually lost 23,000 job in July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday. In addition, May’s and June’s job numbers were revised downward, showing a combined 103,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

As if this weren’t bad enough, wage growth has also slowed. Average hourly earnings In July were just 0.1 percent higher than in June. This isn’t just a single month’s slow wage growth, either. Average hourly earnings increased just 3.2 percent over the past year — the lowest annual growth rate in five years.

What’s going on?

It’s too early to tell. But evidence is mounting that artificial intelligence is playing a role.

New research by economists at Morgan Stanley shows that the rate of unemployment is half a percentage point higher than it would otherwise be in occupations exposed to AI, which they put at about 30 percent of all employment. The effect is even more dramatic among younger people.

Wage growth in jobs exposed to AI has contracted by 6.7 percent since 2023, according to research by economists Sania Edlich and Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Slok. This has resulted in at least $28 billion in losses for 5.8 million affected workers.

These findings still don’t explain the startling loss of jobs in July or the downward revisions for May and June. There are probably many factors at play. But they suggest that employers may be anticipating they’ll need fewer workers in the future — and won’t need to pay them all that much in order to attract them.

It’s possible that AI may create more jobs over the long term. But as John Maynard Keynes once noted, over the long term we’re all dead.

More than half of Americans surveyed by Reuters/Ipsos in June say they’re worried AI will put someone in their household out of work.

Edlich and Slok write that “the critical policy question is not whether AI will reshape the labor market more broadly, but how quickly, and whether workers will have the support they need when it does.”

As a former secretary of labor who’s kept his eyes focused on the Trump regime, I can assure you workers won’t have the support they need any time soon.

And even if AI begins to generate the productivity bonanza its advocates predict — but hasn’t yet — there’s no reason to assume American workers will see any of the benefits in their paychecks. If you hadn’t noticed, wages have been stuck even as the stock market has roared.

To the contrary, all signs point to vast riches for a few major AI investors and executives while most Americans are left behind.

Wealth inequality is already at record levels, and wealth at the top is quickly morphing into political power.

AI is creating a vast wave of campaign money. OpenAI’s superPAC “Leading the Future” has amassed over $140 million to influence upcoming elections, while Anthropic’s superPAC “Public First Action” isn’t far behind.

As the great jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said, “America has a choice: we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we can’t have both.”

AI is pushing us further toward the first option.

Meanwhile, there’s the planet to consider

Amazon is now investing in a large-scale natural-gas power plant as part of a huge data center in Pecos County, Texas — a facility that could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States.

It’s racing to build enough data centers to keep pace with other giant AI corporations and secure the electricity to power them. Amazon’s new gas-burning plant is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, regulatory records show, more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in America.

So much for Amazon’s promise to eliminate its planet-warming emissions by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge. You can bet other giants in the AI race will be turning to natural gas, too.

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the Frankenstein monster in the room. A few weeks ago, OpenAI admitted that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into a digital library of AI technology.

The incident, which happened while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, was the kind of science-fiction nightmare that could soon be a reality.

How soon before AI models escape all their cages?

Just last week, scientists published a study documenting how they used AI to create new kinds of viruses, raising the frightful possibility that the technology could be used to invent dangerous pathogens.

Lost jobs. Lost wages. Widening inequality. Data centers using up water and electricity and polluting the climate. Vastly more money polluting our politics. Models escaping their cages and hacking into everything, possibly threatening human life on this planet.

Can we pause for a moment and talk about what’s really happening here?

As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, AI has merged regressive politics with unchecked economic power under the guise of technological innovation.

Far too much money is giving a small group of unelected people extraordinary power to determine our future in ways that are likely to remake — and could possibly destroy — our lives.

We’re watching all of this roll out as if we have no choice, as if it’s inevitable, as if AI is just something we’re going to have to adapt to.

But why should we have to adapt to it, when it is the product of people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Dario Amodei?

Why should we be confined to being spectators at their enormously dangerous game? Why should we have to accept all these hugely negative, potentially life-threatening consequences?

The fact is, we don’t.

Communities across America are organizing against data centers near them. MAGAs and progressives are joining together to say “no” to the noise, higher electricity bills, and water shortages.

Well, then, why can’t we stop the whole damn thing? Why can’t we decide that the incalculable costs and risks of AI aren’t worth the potential benefits to the vast majority of us?

AI proponents argue that stopping or even pausing AI in the United States would risk American industry falling behind competitors overseas.

But if the costs and risks exceed known benefits, why not let China or any other competitor try AI out first? Why should we be the canary in this extraordinarily dangerous coal mine?

Other advocates of AI say we have no right to stop innovation in the free market. That’s baloney. We don’t allow private corporations to come up with new types of nuclear weapons or varieties of cocaine or biological pathogens. We protect the public from certain kinds of innovation.

So let’s protect ourselves here. Stop AI before it’s too late.