Jonathan P. Baird

So many articles have been appearing about AI that it is difficult to get a handle on what about it is most important to consider. The story about the AI researcher from Anthropic who warned there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the decade was both scary and compelling.

The AI story that has been most underappreciated and that grabs me is the potential job loss. You might think a new technology would bring with it an array of uncompromised benefits but one outcome of AI is likely to be mass unemployment. AI could eliminate nearly 100 million U.S. jobs in a decade. That is a conclusion reached by Sen. Bernie Sanders in a report he prepared for a U.S. Senate committee last October.

AI will make many white collar jobs obsolete. More physical jobs will follow as robots replace humans. Sen. Sanders’ report offers very detailed analysis of how the job market is likely to be affected over the next decade. The report includes a ChatGPT prediction of the 20 occupations with the largest job loss. These include:

• Fast food and counter workers: 89% of the jobs replaced, an estimated 3,310,372 jobs lost
• Customer service representative: 83% of the jobs replaced, an estimated 2,462,167 jobs lost
• Laborer and freight, stocking, material movers, hand: 81% of the jobs replaced, an estimated 2,441,400 jobs lost
• Retail salesperson: 62% of the jobs replaced,, an estimated 2,372,957 jobs lost

And these are just the four jobs with the largest percentage of predicted job loss. There are many others that could put millions more out of work. I was surprised by many of the jobs where workers would lose out: home health aides, software developers, heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, RNs’and teaching assistants.

It is not like this scenario has not already been happening. By October 2025, Amazon, which made $59.2 billion in profits in 2024 had already laid off 27,000 aince 2022 telling its staff, “We expect [generative artificial intelligence and agents] will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company”.

Leaked internal planning documents indicate Amazon’s long-term strategy is to automate up to 75% of operations by 2033. Amazon has been deploying autonomous mobile robots like Proteus (which can carry heavy carts and respond to plain-English verbal commands), touch-sensitive units like Vulcan and tote-handling systems like STARK.

It has long been a dream of capitalists to replace humans with machines. The cost-saving would be spectacular and that is not lost on the capitalist class. They would be turning capital into labor. Machines don’t complain about bosses, wages or working conditions.

There is also the reality that AI will replace new jobs that could have been created if there was no AI or AI that was deployed far less aggressively.

AI companies acknowledge that their goal is to make it easier to pay workers less. Mechanize, a start-up aiming to create artificial labor notes on its website that “the market potential is absurdly large” and points to the total income earned by workers. Artisan, another AI company, is advertising its services to get companies “to stop hiring humans”.

Where is the public discussion around the effects of AI on our working class? Congress has completely failed to initiate any discussion so it fell upon the minority party leaders like Sen. Sanders to raise concerns. Sen. Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar have introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act to outlaw artificial super intelligence permanently, to pause advanced AI development and to establish a new Department of AI to regulate frontier systems and enforce safety standards. It should be clear that we cannot trust the tech billionaires to police themselves.

Sen. Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have also introduced an AI Data Center Moratorium Act. This measure would pause AI data center construction and hardware exports pending worker and safety protections.

More than 1300 scientists and developers from across the tech world published an open letter this last July warning that AI development is moving at a pace that makes it difficult to address and identify the risks of the technology. There needs to be an international coordinated effort to slow down the development of frontier models so that regulators can create safety guardrails around the tech.

Considering the projected economic job loss AI portends, humans might want to invoke an AI kill switch. Is massive job loss an acceptable and inevitable dimension of the tech change or is the loss being driven by greedy billionaires who are trying to maximize profits at the expense of workers? It is not Luddite to be concerned when the working class faces the elimination of millions of jobs with zero consideration for worker need. How will working people survive an increasingly jobless future where machines have replaced them?

At the same time, AI advance looks to increase the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a few billionaires. I have not mentioned the scary surveillance possibilities of AI or the environmental harm of data centers.

AI looks to be a universal labor replacing machine. Is this the future we want? That would be a good debate. How will workers survive and make money to pay for life necessities in this future? It has been demonstrated that our crop of billionaires do not have a “share the wealth” mentality. They have exactly the opposite.

Before we forge ahead, how about a public discussion of these questions. I think it is crazy if we don’t have government regulation. The risks could not be higher. The two OpenAI models that went rogue and hacked into a real company, Hugging Face, could not be a bigger red flag.