Trump Rewrites the Rules, But AI Is Rewriting The Future

In the first two months of President Trump's second term, almost everything the world took for granted regarding the United States has been shaken to its very roots. Trump's disruptions have been so severe that he is dominating media coverage and stunned global capitals.

Illegal immigration across the southern border is now down to a trickle. To address the "anchor baby" problem, Trump issued an Executive Order on his first day defining who would qualify for America's birthright citizenship. [In federal court yesterday, the respected former Attorney General Ed Meese, a Constitutional scholar, filed a brief in support of Trump's position].

Federal civilian employment is down by nearly 200,000, although every Trumpian action is being contested in the courts. DOGE has exposed fraud, shredding hundreds of thousands of wasteful contracts. USAID is practically on life support. The Department of Education could well shut down altogether with its education loan operations taken over by the United States Treasury.

Israel and Gaza announced a truce. Stubborn Ukraine has agreed to a 30-day cease-fire, while Russia, too, is philosophically on board. America voted with Russia at the UN not to hold Russia accountable for hostilities committed in Ukraine three years ago. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Trump continues to talk about expanding United States territory, including Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal - like James Polk, America's 11th president did. President Polk acquired vast lands and ensured that America became a bicoastal nation.

But, as usual, the media is ignoring the 64-pound gorilla in the room: the threat to American and global employment posed by advances in Artificial Intelligence. Industry leaders regularly express themselves at technical conferences, but the majority of Americans know very little about the potential for large-scale disruption from AI.

Earlier this week, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, an AI company best known for its Claude 3.5 Sonnet API, publicly stated: "Now, getting to the kind of job side of this...I do have a fair amount of concern about this...On one hand, I think Comparative Advantage is a very powerful tool...If I look at coding, programming, which is one area where AI is making the most progress, what we are finding is we are not far from a world...I think we will be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90% of the code, and in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is essentially writing all of the code."

Amodei is a well-respected authority in the AI world. An Italian-American, he grew up in San Francisco, attended Caltech, and later Stanford to earn a degree in Physics. At Princeton, Amodei earned a PhD in Physics, specializing in neural networks, the technology that powers modern Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. He returned to Stanford's School of Medicine as a postdoctoral student to continue research on how the human brain works before joining Google as an engineer. He later became one of the first employees at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Amodei quit OpenAI in 2019 to start Anthropic, which today is valued at $62 billion, with big-name investors like Amazon pumping money into it. Google is said to own 14% of Anthropic.

As shocking as Amodei's prediction may be, it is not surprising because other industry leaders have sounded the same warnings.

On The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Mark Zuckerberg discussed the future of AI at Meta, specifically regarding its potential to take over the functions of mid-level engineers: "Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code." He elaborated that while this technology would initially be expensive to implement, it would become more efficient over time, eventually leading to a point where "a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers."

We already know that AI has dramatically impacted the hiring market for non-techies, such as customer service representatives, as AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are handling routine inquiries and support tasks. These systems can manage a high volume of requests, provide 24/7 support, and resolve common issues without human intervention, reducing the need for traditional customer service roles. For those remaining in the industry, AI innovations such as intelligent call routing, where systems use machine learning algorithms to route calls to the most suitable agent, help lower worker stress. As first-call resolution rates improve, customers spend less time on hold, and the need to transfer calls between agents diminishes. Workers in relatively mechanical tasks, such as data entry clerks, also see that their jobs are at risk as AI can extract data, categorize it, and enter it into databases more quickly and accurately.

Amodei's and Zuckerberg's estimates for tech employment are ominous. In 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported approximately 1.63 million software developers, software quality assurance analysts, and testers employed in the U.S. Broader estimates that include related roles—such as systems analysts, programmers, and other IT professionals who may also engage in software development—could expand this number to nearly 4 million professionals.

To be sure, not every employer who hires software professionals is as technically astute as Meta or Anthropic to make the switch away from people engineers to AI. However, even if 25% of the tech jobs are lost in the United States alone, the impact could be one million highly skilled professionals who may become unemployed and need to be retrained. Besides this, international students continue to flock to America to seek degrees in computer science and engineering with hopes of obtaining coveted skilled-worker visas (85,000 new H-1B visas will be granted on April 1 by lottery), forcing American techies to compete with foreigners also to hold on to their jobs.

A global reset of tech employment would also have consequences for the American economy, as other countries would scale back American purchases. To understand the scale, consider that the Indian IT-BPM (Information Technology—Business Process Management) posted revenues of $253.9 billion in 2023-24. India uses the foreign exchange generated by its IT business to acquire American products, primarily weapons, advanced machinery, chemicals, minerals, and oil. Lower revenues by India's IT sector could force India to conserve foreign exchange, limiting purchases of American exports.

The fallout of AI integration and automation will be felt far beyond the software and tech industries. Should the predictions and warnings by the tech entrepreneurs come true, AI could disrupt much of the world’s economy.

Rajkamal Rao is a columnist and a member of the tippinsights editorial board. He is an American entrepreneur and wrote the WorldView column for the Hindu BusinessLine, India's second-largest financial newspaper, on the economy, politics, immigration, foreign affairs, and sports.

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