The Nerds Are Unknowingly Creating Perfect Storm Targeting Americans
By Mary Rooke, Daily Caller News Foundation | January 28, 2025
While it is incredibly important for the U.S. to be the prevailing force in the race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominance, our increased reliance on this particular technology will undoubtedly leave millions of American workers without employment.
What we do with this reality will shape how society forms for decades.
AI has gained a significant foothold globally. In a 2023 economics report released by Goldman Sachs, analysts found that AI could eliminate around 300 million full-time equivalent jobs globally across several industries by 2030. The U.S. alone could lose around 10 million jobs to AI automation, including jobs like warehouse and manufacturing workers.
We know what happens when a significant number of jobs that do not require a college degree are displaced due to emerging new technology. During the Industrial Revolution, particularly in agriculture, machines replaced manual labor, forcing a mass migration of men (and their families if they were lucky) out of their homes and into cities looking for factory work.
Despite the positives of automation in society, like access to cheaper, faster products and an economic boom, a substantial portion of the working class experienced what is akin to a wrecking ball demolishing their lives as they knew them. These workers experienced high rates of poverty, depression, and often poor living conditions, which is hardly conducive to creating a healthy society.
Probably the most important thought being left out of the race for AI dominance is how this new technology, and its almost guaranteed job loss, affect U.S. citizens who do not have the education to transition. If we aren’t asking this, we’ve learned nothing from the devastation of the Midwest after factory jobs left.
What Americans living in the Midwest and Eastern U.S. went through when the factories shut down will likely be more similar to what happens when AI takes over jobs than with the Industrial Revolution. During the Industrial Revolution, trainable jobs were promised on the other side. However, with AI, how will tradesmen (currently working in warehouses and manufacturing companies) learn the new tech? This isn’t the same as when men left the field to train on a new machine. Working in the tech industry requires advanced degrees and years of experience– something most warehouse workers and retail clerks don’t have.
While Statista research finds that AI will bring approximately 69 million new jobs to the global economy, we will lose around 83 million other jobs over the next five years. That leaves 14 million currently employed workers out of a job.
During the Midwestern Great Depression, which started in 2001 after China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), the loss of manufacturing jobs not only hurt the workers but had a ripple effect that gutted smaller metropolitan and rural areas surrounding the factories. When these manufacturing plants went up, entire towns were formed around housing, feeding, and educating the families that moved in. These factories provided good-paying jobs for millions of workers without college degrees, which offered an opportunity for upward mobility that would have otherwise been out of reach.
But when the factory jobs disappeared, so did societal cohesion. The Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nonprofit trade policy think tank, described the devastation in one such city: Danville, Virginia, home to textile manufacturer Dan River Mills, incorporated in 1882.
When the mill finally closed its doors in 2006, after hemorrhaging jobs for over a decade, the city entered the final stage of societal decline.
“When the jobs left, Danville’s crime rate skyrocketed,” according to the Coalition. “And even after a slow decline over the ensuing years, in 2015, Danville still ranked as the second most crime-riddled municipality in the state of Virginia, with violent crimes 211 percent higher than the state average and all crimes 66 percent higher than the national average. In recent years, drug addiction, particularly opioids, have plagued the community, and youth suicide rates have spiked nearly 50 percent above the state average.”
This story repeats across several U.S. states, like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
Still, the backdrop to this cautionary tale is the reality that despite all of this, not only is AI inevitable, but the role the U.S. plays in the field is crucial to our economic and national safety.
Silicon Valley engineer and venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya discussed the importance of America’s AI dominance in a Thursday interview with Tucker Carlson.
“It is important for all 330 million Americans to take a step back and acknowledge this one truth, and I think that it is a completely canonical statement that is inviolate for being an American: We are the single most important country in existence in the world. We are the most important country today. We must be the most important country tomorrow. Period,” Palihapitiya said.
“There are two things that underpin that. We are the single most vibrant economy in the world, and we are the single strongest military in the world,” he continued. “And there is only one thing that gives you both of those two things, which is technological supremacy.”
Palihapitiya warned that the U.S. is at “an existential risk of losing our place in the world” not because of technological disadvantages but regulatory constraints. He details the failures of the Biden Administration on AI dominance due to its obsession with DEI and so-called green energy (like solar farms and nuclear power), which it overregulated to the point of being out of reach for most US companies. The Biden Administration made it financially impossible for other countries to come to the U.S. for their AI chips, thus forcing them to look East to China for a cheaper supply.
“If you look at Meta. Meta has poured 10s of billions of dollars to training a brain, an AI brain that’s called Llama, … Meanwhile in December, a Chinese company open-sourced a model where they spent 10s of millions of dollars, and in many cases, that digital brain is smarter than both Meta’s and OpenAI’s on many dimensions,” Palihapitiya said. “What do you think that means for the other 182 countries around the world that want to do something in AI? Are they going to take the $10 billion version, or are they going to take the $10 million version?”
“It cost $10 billion because of all the roadblocks that we put in front of companies to make the things that we need to make to maintain our technological supremacy,” he added.
Because of this, Americans watched as tech stocks lost billions on Monday due to the arrival of the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, sparking even greater fears that China has already leapfrogged U.S. dominance in AI development. China’s AI app became the top free app in the Apple App Store after users were granted access to the technology over the weekend.
Where does that leave the U.S.? Undoubtedly, we cannot allow China to win the AI race if we want to continue to be the most powerful nation in the world. The reality is that whichever country holds the technological advantage is king, and we are still in the fight.
President Donald Trump announced that the private sector will invest $500 billion to build the US’s AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate with technology companies OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the start of their new government AI program, ChatGPT Gov. It will be a “tailored version of ChatGPT designed to provide U.S. government agencies with an additional way to access OpenAI’s frontier models,” the website stated.
However, while technological supremacy is essential to global dominance, it is just as important to ensure that American workers and, by extension, American society do not suffer from this technological revolution. The U.S. is not just an economic playground. It is a country of citizens, and everything we do must revolve around ensuring that our American society stays healthy and vibrant. The task of the Trump Administration is to weigh these two realities to avoid the pitfalls that destroy American lives.
Mary Rooke is a commentary and analysis writer at the Daily Caller News Foundation
Original article link