Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has weighed in with a scorching proposal to confront one of the most existential employment issues of our time: AI automation.
A long-time advocate for labor rights, Sanders recently released a report about the impact AI could have on jobs over the next decade. The worst-case scenario outlined by the paper is startling: that “AI and automation could destroy nearly 100 million US jobs in a decade.”
The core problem, the report found, is that US workers aren’t receiving their fair share of the profits, which have risen drastically in recent years.
“Since 1973, there has been an explosion in technology and a massive increase in worker productivity,” it reads. “But the resulting economic gains have gone almost exclusively to those at the top. While productivity has risen by 150 percent and corporate profits have increased more than 370 percent, real wages have gone down for the average American worker by nearly $30 a week.”
Here, Sanders is pointing to an economic issue known as the productivity-wage gap. Decades before AI was even a glimmer in Elon Musk’s eye, corporations began suppressing worker’s pay, even as productivity grew, allowing them to pocket the difference. As of 2024, the gulf between worker productivity and wages has become so wide that a fair minimum wage is calculated to be around $25 an hour — over three times the current federal minimum of $7.25.
AI and automation, Sanders is worried, has the potential to make that much worse. Corporate execs aren’t exactly shy about it, either, as they brag about workers whose jobs they get to automate and wield AI like a cudgel to push fewer workers to toil harder for less.
Either way, Sanders has a solution: a “robot tax,” levied against large corporations to distribute to workers whose lives are upended by technological automation. As the report describes it, this would function as a “direct excise tax” on the tech itself, ensuring the “wealth created by these technologies are redistributed back to the workers impacted.”
In other words, it’s a variation on the idea of a universal basic income (UBI), meted out to those directly affected by automation.
“If workers are going to be replaced by robots, as will be the case in many industries, we’re going to need to adapt tax and regulatory policies to assure that the change does not simply become an excuse for race-to-the-bottom profiteering by multinational corporations,” Sanders wrote in his 2023 book “It’s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism,” per Business Insider.
Whether or not the disaster scenario comes to pass remains to be seen. There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical — for example, the fact that AI is failing to generate revenue at 95 percent of the firms that roll it out.
On the other hand, Sanders’ proposal might not go far enough; as BI notes, even Bill Gates supports the idea — a cautionary flag that Sanders’ view might be more mainstream than you’d think.
As some commentators argue, without a vastly expanded social safety net, a UBI can only ever be a band-aid fix leading to a new type of state-backed poverty. For UBI to be truly universal, it must be accompanied by worker protections like rent freezes and price controls, to say nothing of democratic control of the workplace in the first place.
More on AI: Bernie Sanders: If AI Is Doing Such Amazing Work, Everyone Should Get a Four-Day Workweek
Source link
