I felt a bit underdressed when I met Andrew Yang for lunch. He was wearing a suit, and I was wearing a dingy flannel shirt, which I’d gotten for Christmas in 2019, the year before Yang ran for president on a plan to institute universal basic income to deal with the specter of artificial intelligence-induced mass employment (among other things). I remember scoffing at his campaign at the time—an unrealistic solution to a hypothetical problem.
But the problem wasn’t hypothetical for long.
According to recent reports, AI is already replacing thousands of workers every month, and things could get much worse, with AI CEOs like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei predicting that unemployment could spike to 10 to 20 percent within the next five years. This week, polling showed that a third of voters think neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are good at “dealing with artificial intelligence”—and, presumably, the myriad threats it poses to the good life.
