AI & Jobs

Many graduation speakers in 2026 have been roundly booed when they tried to extol the benefits of AI. Wealthy pundits have dismissed these students as out of touch with reality, as denying the inevitable. In fact, the opposite is true — these young people are completely grounded in reality. They see clearly what is coming, and they are right to be alarmed.

A serious examination of AI's ramifications could read like the darkest dystopian fiction. AI threatens large-scale unemployment on a scale that could dwarf the devastation of the Great Depression. Even well-educated, highly qualified people who have done everything right face the prospect of being severely underemployed or out of work entirely —through no fault of their own. The critical difference from past economic disruptions is this: after the Depression, the jobs came back — better than before. AI offers no such promise. This time, the jobs may never come back.

It must be terrifying to look at your future and see that path closing. Marriage, homeownership, children — the building blocks of a stable life — may be out of reach not because of personal failure, but because the economy itself has been structurally transformed beneath your feet.

Capitalism depends on plentiful, good-paying jobs to function. It falters badly when new jobs are scarce, and it has no built-in answer for a world where they disappear permanently. These young people see this clearly. They also fear — with good reason — that the older generation will not recognize the disaster until it is too late. When unemployment begins to rise, many will assume it is a temporary cycle, apply 20th-century solutions to a 21st-century structural collapse, and dismiss new approaches as radical simply because they don't fit old frameworks. The tsunami is coming, and those clinging to outdated economic paradigms may not see it until it has already hit.

At the same time, the younger generation must reckon honestly with the failures of Communism — a reality most older Americans witnessed firsthand. Communism sounds appealing in the abstract. In practice, it produces centralized power, the suppression of individual freedom, and totalitarian regimes responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Tojo combined. It is not the answer.

So what is the answer to a future without enough jobs? That is the defining question of our age, and it demands careful, honest thinking — thinking that avoids both the failures of unchecked capitalism and the catastrophic track record of communism.

The United States already operates as a form of European-style social democracy: a capitalist economy and democratic government paired with a substantial social safety net. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, SSDI, TANF, Unemployment Insurance, CHIP, ACA subsidies, SNAP, WIC, school meal programs, Section 8, energy assistance, VA benefits, vocational rehabilitation, FEMA, and the SBA — the majority of the federal budget already flows through programs like these.

The first step is ensuring this system works — rooting out the serious fraud and waste that can bankrupt these programs and erode public trust in them.

As AI advances, the gap between rich and poor will widen and unemployment will rise to levels never seen before — and never recover. The logical response is to expand social support programs, funded by the individuals and corporations growing wealthier and wealthier on the back of AI-driven productivity gains.

The path forward is neither laissez-faire capitalism, which offers no answer to structural joblessness, nor communism, which promises paradise and delivers misery. It is a gradual, deliberate expansion of social benefits— scaled in proportion to the permanent displacement AI creates — built on democratic foundations and funded by those who profit most from the transformation.