On his first full day in office, President Donald Trump unveiled Stargate, a $500 billion venture with three major tech firms to build the “largest AI infrastructure project in history.”
Big Tech leaders’ willingness to invest such vast sums of money in this new venture is music to Trump’s ears, of course. The project promises groundbreaking technological advancements at a time of economic stagnation, cementing Trump’s legacy already as the president who ushered in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
But as Big Tech cozies up to the man they once sought to silence, it’s not hard to see how the president is leading his working-class base, like lambs, to the slaughter—building a technology designed to replace the people who put him in office.
The AI Threat?
This isn’t just a theory, either; it’s the next logical step for AI. As OpenAI and others build Artificial Super Intelligence that might someday cure Cancer and deliver other unimaginable scientific advances within just the next few years, developers are simultaneously working on agentic AI – a technology that can effectively replace any person who works from the other side of a computer screen – on existing infrastructure.
Additionally, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a theoretical type of artificial intelligence that OpenAI says “outperforms humans at most economically valuable work,” could also arrive as soon as 2025 – compounds the threat to workers across all industries, but perhaps most immediately, the administrative space. Per 2023 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there are more than 18.5 million office administrative workers in the United States, making up 12.2% of the total national workforce.
These numbers matter because these workers are most immediately at risk of losing their jobs to agentic AI software tools. They are also the workers most easily identified as being at risk. We also know, for example, that as of March 2023, 35% of the national workforce was working from home full-time, meaning that, in theory, as much as one-third of American workers are at risk of being replaced by AI software in the next several years, with the only real hurdle being the creation, adoption, and implementation of AI software tools into companies’ workflows.
However, those 18.5 million administrative workers are already far more significant than the 100,000 new workers anticipated to be onboarded by Stargate’s Texas operations over the next four years. They are also likely not suitable candidates for tech roles. Out of those 100,000 jobs created, a small fraction will be reserved for administrative and office roles, while the majority are likely to require extensive knowledge of computer technology and software–you know, the roles that Elon Musk has argued are better suited to H-1B visa holders than Americans.
I Already Have Felt the Impact of AI
And if this all seems too theoretical, consider this: AI is already impacting creative industries. In China, for example, the adoption of AI image generation technology has led to a 70% reduction in video game illustrator jobs across the country. The proliferation of this technology has forced the remaining creative workers – including artists, writers, and web designers – to dramatically reduce their prices.
Just last summer, I myself was forced to fire my entire team of 40 people after ChatGPT dramatically impacted the copywriting and copyediting industry. My ragtag crew of single mothers, disabled people, and others who struggled to find traditional employment found themselves out of work after my business – something I had spent the last 15 years building – suddenly could not compete with the advent of AI copy-generating tools.
Now imagine this on a national scale. AI apologists tell us that workers and businesses will simply need to pivot or adapt to this new technology as we did after the Industrial Revolution and during the slow and gradual evolution of the World Wide Web. But AI is fundamentally different. This technology is not merely a tool designed to be used by the masses, nor is it a technology that will gradually improve over time. AI’s real purpose is evident in its name: intelligence. This technology is designed to replace tens of millions of American workers, leaving people, during a time of economic hardship, I might add, scrambling to find new work in industries with which they are not familiar.
What Is Coming
New data from the World Economic Forum (WEF) presents a conflicting vision of the ongoing AI rollout. By 2027, the WEF says that businesses anticipate that 44% of workers’ core skills will be disrupted by the technology, but that by 2030, 170 million new roles will be created and 92 million displaced, resulting in a net gain of 78 million new roles. But the data misses an important reality: that many workers are not suited for roles any more complex than those for which they are already responsible. For millions of Americans, administrative work that requires their time more than it does their intellect is their only real option, whether that’s a result of the limited abilities, lifestyle, or life circumstances.
I know that in my business, flexible writing work provided security to disabled workers who couldn’t conduct manual labor and single mothers who needed something they could handle after their small children went to bed. For these people, AI is a greater threat to their livelihood than an illegal alien willing to do the role for a lot less pay. AI will do it for the cost of a computer and a single human operating it, leaving a very big question unanswered: how do tens of millions of people with no job prospects pay their mortgages, raise their children, and live their lives?
With or without the seemingly inevitable introduction of Universal Basic Income to support those people, it seems the United States is well on its way to creating a permanent underclass of Americans who will be forced to get by on the bare minimum for the rest of their lives. So rather than taking America back to a golden age where a family could be sustained by one working parent with a middle-management job, the new Trump administration may oversee the rapid streamlining of multibillion-dollar businesses with millions of American workers fired. Big companies get bigger and more profitable, while the people who made those companies possible are kicked to the curb.
The data supports this prediction, too; some 41% of American companies said in a recent survey that they anticipate reducing their workforces over the next five years as a direct result of the advent of AI.
Meanwhile, those not yet fired are reporting that, as their employers require them to implement AI tools into their workflows, their workloads are increasing. Some 77% of employees reported that AI has substantially increased their workloads, leaving them deflated and overworked as they help these AI tools become better at what they do. We saw understandable national outrage in 2015 when it was revealed how Disney employees were made to train their H-1B replacements, but we have yet to see similar outrage about American workers being made to train the AI tools that will eventually replace them.
President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida.
It is hard to believe that the Big Tech CEOs are unaware of the damage their technologies will inevitably do to the U.S. economy. The question is whether President Trump understands what is about to happen – and if he is conscious of it, whether or not he is preparing to engage with members of Congress on establishing guard rails that allow for the simultaneous development of this groundbreaking technology and the protection of workers most at risk of losing everything.
I am yet to see any signs that this might be the case.
About the Author: Jack Buckby
Jack Buckby is a British-born author, counter-extremism researcher, and business owner. Now based in New York, Buckby writes about deradicalization, technology, and defense.
