JP Yim/Getty Images for The Asian American Foundation
- Andrew Yang warned in 2018 that automation could “destabilize society” and spark riots.
- He says that future is here, predicting 40 million job losses and urging a UBI funded by AI giants.
- “We could be doing much more for the millions of Americans who are going to be displaced,” he said.
Andrew Yang has warned for several years that automation would upend the American workforce.
In the run-up to his 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he predicted that self-driving cars alone could displace a million mostly male truck drivers with limited education — a shift that could “destabilize society” and even trigger “riots in the street,” he told The New York Times in 2018.
Seven years later, Yang says the crisis he feared is no longer hypothetical.
“It’s aging very, very well, unfortunately,” he told CNN’s Michael Smerconish of his predictions in a recent interview.
AI job losses are no longer theoretical
Recent analyses indicate that AI and automation are already capable of performing a significant share of US labor tasks and are reshaping employment.
MIT’s Iceberg Index, released last week, found that current AI systems can already technically perform skills representing 11.7% of the US labor market — roughly $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, healthcare, and professional services.
The New York Times, citing internal Amazon strategy documents and interviews, reported in October that the company believes automation could allow it to avoid hiring more than 600,000 US workers over the next few years, and that its robotics team has an ultimate goal of automating 75% of its operations.
Salesforce, Walmart, HP, IBM, and Fiverr have all cited AI in recent rounds of layoffs or announced layoffs tied to AI.
“44% of American jobs are either repetitive manual or repetitive cognitive and thus could be subject to AI and automation,” Yang said in the interview with CNN. “We’re seeing that unfold right now.”
Yang’s 44% estimate is broadly in line with some major studies on automation.
An IMF analysis from 2024 suggested that around 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected by AI, with half benefiting from the technology and the other being negatively impacted by it.
A McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report released last month found that technologies could theoretically automate more than half of US work hours.
Yang’s warning: Up to 40 million jobs could vanish
Yang pushed back against Roman Yampolskiy, a computer science professor at the University of Louisville and an AI safety researcher, who in September predicted 99% unemployment within five years.
“It’s going to get bad. I certainly don’t think 99% bad,” Yang said.
Using his 44% vulnerability benchmark, Yang offered a rough projection: if the US “churns through” even half of those jobs over the next decade, the country could see 30 to 40 million positions eliminated.
“That would be devastating,” he said. “That would be catastrophic for many, many communities.”
His fix: guaranteed income paid for by the companies winning the AI boom
The rapid pace of AI-driven disruption has revived Yang’s signature policy idea: a universal basic income that gives every American adult $1,000 a month, no strings attached.
He said guaranteed cash would help workers survive the shockwaves of automation and maintain basic economic stability.
To fund a nationwide program, Yang said the firms driving AI’s explosive growth should bear the cost.
He cited Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who floated to Axios in May the idea of a “token tax” that the government should levy on AI companies.
With tech giants generating “hundreds of billions” in value — powered in part by data the public never knowingly provided — Yang said an AI tax or “compute tax” could raise “very big numbers very quickly.”
Given that the US produced roughly $85,000 in GDP per person in 2024, according to the World Bank, Yang said his $12,000 annual Freedom Dividend “seems pretty modest and reasonable.”
A final warning
Yang said that a cash stipend isn’t a cure-all — people also need purpose, structure, and a sense of community.
But without financial stability, he said, millions risk being left behind and pushed toward radicalization.
“We could be doing much, much more for the millions of Americans who are going to be displaced,” Yang said.
The post He predicted an automation crisis years ago. Now, Andrew Yang says AI may wipe out 40 million jobs over the next decade. first appeared on Capitol Riot – capitol-riot.com.
