Gina Raimondo considers herself an AI optimist. She wants her children to live in America, where jobs are created and the benefits of AI are unimaginable today. “Better healthcare, better technology, better data,” she says.
So why is the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Governor of Rhode Island so concerned about the threat of mass layoffs tearing at the fabric of American society?
There’s a lack of planning, she says.
“I think the worst-case scenario is that we don’t have a plan to make sure every American has a good job in the age of AI,” Raimondo told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on the first episode of Season 2 of the “CNBC Changemakers” podcast.
“Tens of millions of Americans will lose their jobs or be underemployed. If that happens…I’m very worried. I think the economic recession could be deep and long-lasting. I think there could be riots in the streets. I mean that with all my heart. I wouldn’t have said that 10 years ago, but over the last 10 years, economic inequality has gone through the roof and our democracy is fraying every day,” Raimondo, who now heads Raise Us, said in a statement. , a national nonprofit focused on employment transition, said in a podcast interview in late August.
Such an outcome would be doubly bad, she says. This is because it would require regulators to step in to block AI innovation, potentially ceding technological leadership to China and other countries.
“If we leave AI alone and we wake up and the unemployment rate stays at 10 to 11 percent for three to four years, and the unemployment rate for young people and people in their 20s stays at 20 percent, I think we’re screwed,” Raimondo said. “That’s not a technical term, so let’s move on.”
The truth is that no one can know for sure what will happen in the job market, and those who claim to know have gone too far. While many jobs are currently booming thanks to AI, the authors warn that preliminary research on the impact of AI on jobs and wages is little more than educated speculation. Meanwhile, some of the leading figures in the AI revolution have not done a very convincing job in recent attempts to explain why a job creation boom is almost certain.
Raimondo says he believes in long-term net job creation from AI. This is a job we can’t imagine today. “I believe that AI, like any technology, will create new jobs, even more jobs, in the years ahead. I really do, but we need a planned transition. Otherwise, if we just put blinders on and unleash new technologies without a plan to take all Americans with us, I think you know what we just talked about. … I don’t have faith in the market to guide us through this transition without major disruption,” she said.
Her concerns about a thorny AI transition period for the labor market stem, at least in part, from conversations she had with CEOs after leaving her job as President Biden’s Commerce Secretary. “When I left government, CEOs of major American companies called me and said they were worried about massive job losses due to AI and robotics. Instead of one or two CEOs, I got a call from a number, as if to say, ‘What are you going to do?'”
Recent concerns about the existential threat posed by AI, posed by a series of growing breaches by rogue agents at a major Frontier Institute, are not divorced from job market risks in Raimondo’s way of thinking. In her mind, all dangers are potential signs of acting too quickly without adequate planning.
In a recent LinkedIn post following revelations from OpenAI and Anthropic, Raimondo wrote that there were “too many dangerous incidents across a variety of models.”
“We will lose if we do not take seriously the full range of potential harms of AI, and do more to determine what policies and programs will be most effective. These capabilities will develop faster than we think, and we must ensure that they can be deployed safely and without causing mass unemployment, or we will cause irreparable damage to our democracy and social fabric,” she wrote.
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Raimondo co-founded Raise Us with former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb to create a “best-case scenario” during this time, bringing private capital and government together to create solutions for workers ahead of potential evictions. Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, AMD, ADP, Bank of America, Blackstone, Cisco, Eli Lilly, GM, IBM, Mastercard, and UPS were among the first companies involved in the initiative.
“We need to bring employers to the table and convince them to implement AI in a way that doesn’t result in an overnight collapse of the bottom for tens of millions of Americans,” she said. “We will bring governors to the table to make policy changes to plan the transition to an AI economy.”
To date, the organization is working with businesses and governors in four states: Arkansas, Utah, Maryland, and Connecticut.
“Today they may be call center workers. Two years from now they may be different. But we just have to reset policies like incentives, training, retirement benefits, payroll taxes. … We have to prepare them for the agent economy.”
Ideas being considered at the state level include tenure programs that would provide a gateway to full-time jobs for young Americans in their early 20s who are undecided on their career path. A new model for unemployment insurance. New forms of salary support and retraining for the unemployed, especially workers in their 50s who are at risk of losing their jobs and are not in a position to move on to a new career with comparable pay. And we’ll also consider how to tax labor. “Right now, if you’re an employer, you’re paying payroll taxes on all your employees. You’re not paying anything to your agents. So the incentive is to lay off employees without paying payroll taxes and take advantage of your agents. … That’s my argument for changing incentives,” Raimondo said.
Raimondo previously told CNBC when she launched Raise Us last June that she had a personal interest in displaced older workers, drawing on the experience of her father, who had a successful career as a manufacturing worker but was blindsided by outsourcing and unable to build a bridge to a new career.
“The American workforce system is old. It’s outdated. Unemployment insurance was created 100 years ago during the Great Depression and it’s still the same. The college system. Think about how much money this country spends to subsidize attending college. Pell grants, college grants. , college loans. College doesn’t work for most American students, and yet we keep pouring money into it. It worked in the post-World War II GI Bill, and it hasn’t changed since.” So what do I want to do? We want to take advantage of the fact that AI is changing everything and start changing policies so that all Americans can thrive and have a place in the AI economy. ”
Raimondo acknowledges that this is a “monstrous problem,” but says he has little faith that Congress or the CEO class alone can solve it for the time being.
“Congress is not going to do much. Congress is not going to do anything. There’s not much I’m confident about, but I’d bet a lot of money that Congress won’t pass effective bipartisan legislation to help American workers over the next three years. That’s never going to happen,” she said.
And while some CEOs “get it,” she says, there are many others who don’t.
“I’m building a coalition. … It’s the CEOs and the boards that have said, we know what’s going to happen, we want to experiment and be innovative and do the right thing,” Raimondo said. “A lot of CEOs you call say, ‘No, no, I’m just going to do what I’ve always done, which is maximize short-term profits and short-term stock price.'”
“The motive now is to press the dismissal button.”
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