WASHINGTON ― The populist wing of the Republican Party is beginning to worry that its embrace of artificial intelligence and efforts to shield the tech industry from regulation could backfire, leading to massive job losses that will empower billionaires over the working class.
The warnings from prominent voices within the MAGA world about AI adoption are coming as President Donald Trump works to aggressively expand the industry in a high-stakes race against China. The president this week ordered the nation’s science agencies to deploy AI as part of a broader government-wide effort to remove regulatory barriers for the industry. His administration is also reportedly considering issuing a controversial executive order that would restrict individual states that are tired of waiting on Congress to act from regulating AI.
“I don’t think we are doing enough to protect workers,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who opposes a moratorium on state regulation, said in an interview with HuffPost. “We need to do more because I’m confident Silicon Valley will get rich from this... But what about blue-collar workers in my state?”
Steve Bannon, Trump’s MAGA whisperer and longtime ally, went so far as to calling AI the likely “most dangerous technology in the history of mankind.”
