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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts a white-collar “bloodbath.” Senator Bernie Sanders warns AI could wipe out 100 million American jobs. Elon Musk says work may become optional.
The message is everywhere: machines are coming for your paycheck.
That panic is understandable. But wrong. Yes, AI will disrupt and eventually replace some tasks, just as electricity, the farm tractor, and the internet caused the displacement of mundane and, in some cases, miserable jobs like working in hot, sweaty factories or backbreaking work lifting heavy equipment. Yes, some workers will need help adjusting and retraining to the robotics revolution. Yet the fear of mass technological unemployment repeats a mistake doomsayers have made for centuries, from the tractor to the personal computer.
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In our new study, “Boomsday Not Doomsday,” we show AI can become the most powerful engine of American prosperity in decades. How? AI lowers the price and speeds up production of nearly everything we use: from food, to steel, to cars, to information, to new homes, to new cures for diseases. How does a four day workweek sound?
For most of history, practical expertise was expensive and hard to find. Families, workers and small businesses had to pay consultants, lawyers, programmers, or other specialists, or go without. AI gives Americans useful, personalized assistance for less than the price of a daily cup of coffee, and often for free.
A small-business owner can get help writing a marketing plan. A patient can leave the doctor with clearer instructions. A homeowner can learn whether that crack in the wall requires a professional. A teacher can build custom lesson plans. New health scans can locate possible cancer cells early and save millions of lives.
AI isn’t replacing Americans, it’s making us more capable. It will make life on earth better — especially for the lower half in income, who soon thanks to these productivity improvements have a quality of life that rivals the richest royalty of yesteryear.
The early numbers show how quickly this is happening. Generative AI is growing three times faster than mobile apps or the internet did. Nearly nine in ten organizations now use AI in at least one business function. Americans already value AI tools at $172 billion a year, based on what they’d need to be paid to give them up. Worried about the rising cost of food, gas, housing and health care? Get ready for these things falling in price dramatically.
Widespread prosperity begins like this, with millions of people saving time and money, learning faster and getting more done.
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We have been through panics before. In 1900, more than one in three Americans worked in agriculture. Today fewer than 2% do and we produce 10 times more food on one-third as much farmland. America did not collapse into permanent unemployment. We grew more food with fewer hands. The economy created hundreds of millions of jobs no one could have imagined. The pattern repeats with every leap forward. Technology automates drudgery, raises productivity, and creates new opportunities.
The numbers agree. Unemployment sits at a low 4.3%. Between 2022 and early 2025, the most AI-exposed workers saw smaller unemployment increases than the least exposed. And demand for AI skills is exploding: job postings seeking them jumped 111% in a single year.
Some young workers feel pressure. The answer, as in every transition, is to help American workers use these tools. When they do, everyday improvements will add up to a richer, healthier, happier country. Prisons and reform schools are using AI to train young people for jobs that are waiting for them.
In medicine, Mayo Clinic has used AI to identify pancreatic cancer up to three years earlier. Physicians at The Permanente Group using AI-note takers save roughly an hour a day. Patients get better care that feels less like an assembly line and more like time with someone who listens.
On Main Street, AI helps workers turn know-how into ownership. Jason Walls, a Kentucky master electrician, watched contractors push EV owners into unneeded and expensive electrical panel upgrades. With no coding background, he used AI to build a website that runs the calculations, generates the reports, and saves families money.
We’re seeing this pattern across the economy, in education, construction, and manufacturing.
No one should pretend that every transition will be painless. But while doomsayers worry that AI moves too fast, the real danger is that America moves too slowly. China would love to swoop in and take our place.
We invented this technology, yet too few of us put it to work. More than half of American adults have tried generative AI, but only 28.3% use it regularly, which leaves the United States 24th out of the 30 countries measured. France and the United Kingdom rank higher.
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The Chinese get it. Three out of four people there expect AI to improve their economy. They deploy fast: in 2024, China installed 295,045 industrial robots to America’s 34,164. China has some of the most capable and most popular open-source AI models.
Meanwhile, we are all too often hobbling ourselves here at home. State legislatures introduced more than 1,700 AI bills this year. Some Democrats have demanded government ownership of major AI companies while proposing to ban new AI supercomputers.
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Washington faces a clear choice. It can tax, regulate, ration, or nationalize this technology, reserving its benefits for itself and the biggest companies — and the Chinese. Or, as we did so effectively with the Internet Revolution, we can lead the world and enjoy the fruits of winning the race.
From the days of Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, America has always led by inventing. Let’s be the leaders, not the laggards. To the victors go the spoils — and for the sake of our economic and national security, the victor MUST be the USA.
Neil Chilson is Head of AI Policy at the Abundance Institute and former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission.