Axios CEO warns of 'red screaming light' when it comes to AI

Is AI coming for your job? A string of headlines this month suggests the answer is not only yes, but soon. The New York Times reported that Amazon is on the cusp of replacing more than half a million warehouse jobs with robots, and plans to automate 75% of its operations. The same outlet followed up days later with news that Amazon will cut 14,000 corporate jobs as it plows more than 120 billion into data centers and AI development. Then there's the Wall Street Journal reporting that UPS had cut 48,000 positions in management and operations, and that tens of thousands of white collar jobs are disappearing as companies turn to artificial intelligence to do work once done by humans. Meanwhile, Axios warning that one of the most important real world debates in America right now is whether AI will cause a short term job apocalypse among white collar workers, even as stock market hits record highs. In other words, as the markets boom, the human workforce is quietly being rewritten. Some AI pioneers are saying the quiet part out loud that by the end of the decade, 99% of jobs could be automated away. And if you think that kind of automation sounds sci fi, nightmarish, Democrats are already trying to turn it into a campaign slogan. Axios reports that the left's new energy isn't just about tax the rich, it's about taming the robots. From Bernie Sanders to AOC to Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Socialists using AI as a call to arms, warning that tech greed is about to crush the American worker. The coauthor of that piece, Jim VandeHei, CEO and co-founder of Axios, joins me now. So, Jim, you say there are two trends ripe for Democrats: the evolving popularity of socialists and also the concerns over artificial intelligence. I want to break the two of them down and put up a graph on the screen that shows the relative popularity among Ds, Rs and Is of socialism. When asked whether, as a gut check, you approve of socialism, 66% of Democrats say they do, 38% of Rs, pardon me, of independents say they do, and only 14% of independents. Is that a prescription that can be sold by Democrats all across the country, or only in New York City?

I'm going to put on the screen the three points that you make relative to AI, because I want to amplify this part of the conversation. You say energy prices in many areas are expected to rise as consumers compete with big data centers for finite energy capacity. Job growth is expected to slow, especially for recent college grads, mostly because of AI and AI. Companies and investors are expected to keep getting richer, expanding the inequality gap. Have Republicans surrendered this turf? To me, it's not. It's such an evolving area that it's not so clear that there's a Republican versus Democratic perspective on artificial intelligence. Am I missing something?