Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.
I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.
Just because it can self improve doesn't mean it improves better than everything else or without substantial costs to develop improvement.
Have you ever been to a country where there was extreme poverty?
When people talk about China eliminating extreme poverty, that has a specific international definition. From Wikipedia:
Extreme poverty is the most severe type of poverty, defined by the United Nations (UN) as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services". Historically, other definitions have been proposed within the United Nations.
Extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2018 ($2.66 in 2024 dollars), set by the World Bank.[0]
The average homeless person in America spends several times that amount on drugs, and all of the above services are available to them. Homelessness in America is a societal failure, but it does not meet the definition of extreme poverty.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w&pp=ygUMSGFucyByb3N...
Immigration to the USA, both illegal and legal, has cratered.
Here's a UNICEF report comparing childcare policy amongst rich countries: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/where-do-rich-count...
Sweden ranks third in the comparison metric (what good is free childcare if it is very bad or inaccessible?), and the us ranks 40th out of 41.
Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.
I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.
There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
Many of those regulations at the federal level, yes?
In addition to ones at state level, yes.
If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.
They ALL happened AFTER people got hurt. That's how we do things here. We always have.
It's kind of messed up, but the alternative is a bunch of rules on things that wouldn't be a real problem.
I don’t think I’ve left the scope of this discussion.
I mean the radium fad just by itself was pretty crazy, people used radium suppositories and radium makeup.
With AI, I don’t think there will be a lot of needed regulation until it gets to AI controlling physical machines like self driving cars. But in that respect, we already began regulating before problems appeared.
AI is already hurting people. We need regulation to hold it and its benefactors accountable. The federal government is preempting states from doing so.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgerwp7rdlvo
https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-teen-confided-in-an-ai-c...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/openai-sued-by-7-families-for-all...
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/chatgpt-murder-suicide-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tens-thousand...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/17/tech/electricity-bill-price-i...
It was popularized that an estimated 8,000 infant deaths attributed to swill milk occured every year in NYC in the 1850s (take with a grain of salt).
Even more recently much of the banking regulation only occured after severe market issues that broadly impacted the economy.
On a related note: "Layoffs" are going to be a hard practical harm point to rally around. Unless we fundamentally change the nature of our economy (Which doesn't tend to happen until the previous system collapses.), effeciency is king. Tha market isn't rational, but effeciency is a competitive advantage that compounds over time. So you have a prisoners dilemma here. If you want to restrict a technology that boosts efficiency, you either have to close your market and then put up rules that constrain efficiency or you bleed your prosperity.
Where did you get the idea that this was the cause that created millions of jobs and lead to the US running the world's largest economy, and not say - the knock-on effects of the US joining WW2 relatively late and unscathed, making it the only major world power left with a functioning enough industrial complex to export to war-ravaged Europe?
Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.
Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.
This statement is awfully one-sided.
Can you point to a concrete example of this?
$200M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/1527a7adaff14a5280fc7...
$140M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/c0203e75ec2949e78966f...
$31M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/8b0b944955064864942fc...
$1M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/86d997fbd8a74d0cb298c...
$642M over 10 years - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/c9878b113f5143cba7edb...
$3.1M - https://sam.gov/opp/f15d4b63ebc846cd9f4870cfa0772fff/view
$160M - https://www.anduril.com/news/anduril-awarded-contract-to-red...
$86M - https://www.anduril.com/news/special-operations-command-sele...
$100M - https://www.anduril.com/news/anduril-awarded-usd99-6m-for-u-...
The Marine Corps I-CsUAS award is explicitly described as an IDIQ with a maximum dollar value of $642M over 10 years -- though it could be much less -- and reporting indicates it was competitively procured with 10 offerors. It wasn't "gifted"/"no-bid"
Also: $642M spread over 10 years is roughly $64M/year at the ceiling, and ceilings are often not fully used. That scale is not remotely unusual for a program-of-record counter-UAS capability if the government believes the threat is persistent. (Which it does.)
The rest are similarly mundane and justifiable.
Here's what would be weird: Repeated sole-source awards where a competitive approach is feasible, implausible technical scope relative to deliverables, unjustified pricing, or political intervention affecting downselects. I don't see any of that here. (But, okay, let's not talk about Palantir, lol.)
Imagine Silicon Valley CEOs pumped full of VC dollars and embedded with units that Don't Exist in places We Were Never At.
This is just flat out bribery, using the thinnest of legal fig leaves. Which would not possibly pass muster if he hadn't also packed the court with supporters.
"kept", I think.
So where is this coalition that’s organized to actually make this real?
Software engineers are allergic to unionization (despite the recent id win) and 100% of capital owners (this is NOT business owner and operators I’m talking about LPs and Fund Managers) are in support of labor automation as a priority, the same people also run every government and overwhelmingly select the politicians available to vote for, so who will fund and lead your advocacy?
I'm open to the idea of guilds, but personally I do not want others negotiating for me with the type of work I do, I'd prefer it to be a contract between me, my employer and nothing else. Unions aren't always a net benefit for every industry.
Of course, with AI going the way it is, collective bargaining might become more attractive in our field. But institutions can be slow to catch up and not everyone always agrees with the outcome. Personally, if I worked in Hollywood, I'd be upset about the kind of anti-AI scaremongering and regulation taking place in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.
from what I've been observing in the past three years, the Venn diagram of pro-immigration folx and anti-AI folx is pretty much a single circle.
I know it's a hip thing to say these days but it isn't accurate. I know everyone wants to one-up everything but they are just rich. Oligarchs are generally government officials who are given money and power by government.
"A business oligarch is generally a business magnate who controls sufficient resources to influence national politics."
I'm certainly worried that the AI revolution is different to the others because this one might well optimise humans out of the loop (democracies rely on the fact that the army is made up of people and that dynamic might be breaking) but the risk to jobs is something of a non-factor at scale. We'll have more stuff with less human effort, that is just just a good outcome. "Protecting" people from AI doing their jobs is literally encouraging them work for no reason - it is pointless, wasteful and there are better equilibriums to aim for.
This is naive, productivity increases had decoupled from compensation a long time ago. See https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ for example. AI certainly can create wealth, and in fact already did (hey NVDA), but somehow that did not trickle down. I think more likely than not, AI will further stratify our society.
The typical American is insanely wealthy by global standards.
It is easy for me to take this perspective too because I never had much student debt or children.
The median though is getting crushed if they went to college and are paying for daycare.
If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.
The consequences are obvious. People are going to vote in socialist policies and the whole engine is going to get thrown in reverse.
The "let them eat cake" strategy is never the smart strategy.
It is not obvious at all our system is even compatible with the internet. If the starting conditions are 1999, it would seem like the system is imploding. It is easy to pretend like everything is working out economically when we borrowed 30 trillion dollars during that time from the future.
> If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.
That isn't a factor in wealth inequality. Inequality is how much money they have relative to people like Musk and Bezos - or just local business owners. The poor side of that comparison always has such little wealth/income that their circumstances don't really matter. Someone poor will be sitting in the +-$100k band and not be particularly creditworthy. When compared to a millionaire the gap is still going to be about a million dollars whether they're on the crushed or non-crushed side of the band.
Part of the reason the economic situation gets so bad is because people keep trying to shift the conversation to inequality instead of talking about what actually matters - living standards and opportunities. And convincing people to value accumulating capital, we're been playing this game for centuries, inter-generational savings could have had a real impact if people focused on being effective about it.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-l...
Who cares?
Absolute savings rate and net worth are what matter.
Any European will gladly live in America for US$1 million/year income even if the cost of living is US$300k/year.
https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...
OK, now tell me how the savings and net worth look like for your average American. I'll give you a bit of a spoiler: it's not good.
Even though everyone didn't get rich from the industrial revolution, ultimately people led easier lives, more stuff, and less work.
Instead, they hoped the food stores would last and the kids wouldn't die so they could help work the land next year.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sources-of-real-wage-stag...
The EPI is also not a credible source, given who funds it.
The millions of people who use NVDA’s products do not get value from it? Isn’t it making their lives richer?
And the richness of life it's another philosophical discussion altogether...
Although if we're talking the optimum way of organising society, y'know, re-linking wages and productivity is a probably a good path. This scheme of not rewarding productive people has seen the US make a transition from growth hub of the world to being out-competed by nominal Communists. They aren't exactly distinguishing themselves with that strategy.
Exactly zero of the AI bros who believe they're going to push us into a workless utopia have even began to tell us about how we're all supposed to survive without work or being born obscenely rich.
You may not be aware, but today in 2025 the overwhelming majority of Americans rely on work for survival. They trade time for money, and use that to pay for things like housing or health care or food. How does one acquire these things if they cannot trade their time anymore, in a society that fully believes that even giving a child $1 for lunch money the moral equivalent to the worst atrocities and horrors of Soviet and Chinese socialism?
Which planet is going to sustain that? More productivity doesn't add any resources to sustain your lifecycle.
If we're going to talk about corruption, this pales in comparison to the public sector unions and their support for Democrat candidates who then shower them with massive increases in government spending.
Um, no. Higher productivity translates to greater return on equity for those that hold it, not necessarily workers.
You mean the top tier jobs or the bottom 90%?
They pay so much more because the US is very ok with big income inequality.
Those unions represent a much bigger share of the population, so shouldn't they have more away in a democratic system (where demos is people)
The public sector unions do represent a much larger share of the population than the CEOs but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending. Given they are being rewarded with huge amounts of tax dollars from the party they help keep/put in power, the concern that there's a systemic pay-to-play dynamic at work is very justified.
Uh... Just no? Public spending? That's défense, health care, entitlements etcetera etcetera
I'll actually back it up with some numbers too:
> That’s 1% of gross domestic product, and almost 5% of total federal spending. The government payroll for other developed countries is typically 5% of GDP, Kettl said.
From: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/03/06/federal-workers...
And this
> Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
Not sure what you're basing that on but there's this too > The statistic is used to show how unequal things have become in the U.S.: Some 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with even $400 to pay for an unexpected bill
From: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/what-a-400-dolla...
So unless they're all spending money irrationally, they have no money to save meaning little or no disposable income
There are many ways to slice it but the US median income is high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Apparently that's discretionary income.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A4076C0A144NBEA
All US government employees (federal + state + local): $2.409T in 2023.
US nominal GDP in 2023: $27.812T.
So government compensation = ~8.7% of GDP (2.409 / 27.812).
Breakdown (2023):
Federal government compensation: $634.9B (~2.3% of GDP).
State + local compensation: $1.7846T (~6.4% of GDP).
State/local education: $863.1B
State/local other: $783.2B
For cross-country median disposable income comparisons, OECD has a direct chart:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
Your $400 stat is about liquidity and balance-sheet fragility; it doesn't tell you the cross-country level of median PPP-adjusted disposable income. OECD Figure 4.1 is the relevant comparison.
Generally, countries with more government social spending have lower savings rates, because people irresponsibly rely on the taxpayer as their backstop, so I'm not surprised at all. The U.S. actually has very high levels of social spending, despite the stereotype of it being a very free-market-oriented economy. That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Out of a total number of employed people of ~160M that's 1 in 8 employees. If you're calling 1 in 8 'a small share' the we just disagree there.
As to the $400 statistic, let me just point out that this
> That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Is very much an opinion, not a fact.
Maybe there's also that for the low income earners there isn't any money left after paying for housing, food and such. And I'm not even talking about health insurance.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/204535/number-of-governm...
As for the $400 statistic, it in no way shows that US disposable income PPP is lower than peer countries.
Liquidity does not equal income and savings behavior does not equal purchasing power.
That generous welfare systems reduce savings is well-documented finding.
In what world do you live in and are you taking refugees?
This is not at all how this works. First people to see higher monies are the shareholders and only the shareholders.
Also, The first time Trump was elected, the majority of voters went for Hillary Clinton. Second time, it was still 49% versus 48% for Kamala Harris. The majority of Americans have never voted for Donald Trump nor ever supported him.
Authorithorianism also not just happen - it take years to build and destroy institutions. It took 20 years to build fascist regime in my country.
Sorry for not making it clear enough.
Slavery was really not that long ago, we are still actively invading countries and murdering people for oil, and we help bankroll straight up genocide in regions such as Darfur and Palestine.
This is business as usual.
This govt clearly isn't going to regulate against harms like perpetuating systems of racism. This government adores to perpetuate systems of racism.
So fuck it. Let's race to the bottom like the companies want to so badly.
The rest of the world has always called it corruption.