MAIDENS, South Ayrshire, Scotland — President Donald Trump told Breitbart News concerns over entry-level job losses due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) are misplaced, and there will be a surge in new jobs meant to build out the AI future.
Asked during an exclusive interview in Scotland here at his luxurious seaside golf resort Turnberry last week about a recent report the CEO of AI company Anthropic predicted AI will wipe out as many as 50 percent of entry-level jobs in the future, Trump argued that it will all “balance out” in the end. Trump said AI will make things “much more efficient” but that a sprawling new economy will emerge around the new technology.
“Basically they’re saying that things are going to be much more efficient and that’s good because we don’t have enough people,” Trump said when asked how he balances getting the United States at the forefront of the emerging AI field with job concerns for entry-level workers. “It’s going to balance out, I think, perfectly just by nature because we don’t have enough people. So they’re going to come out and they’re going to do this. We’re going to need robots, as an example. We’re going to need things like this to make our economy run because we do not have enough people. We have plants going up all over the United States like has never happened before. You know, this is the hottest I think the United States has ever been. Think of it: We were a dead country a year ago, and now we have this situation where we’re worried about the people with jobs. We worry much more about the other—we don’t enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient and we’re going to have to add to them and we’ll probably add to them through robotically—it’s going to be robotically—it’s going to happen too. It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself. I think it’s going to be a beautiful picture. But we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency, but we’re going to be much bigger. The end result is you’re going to need jobs even more. It’s going to be very good. I’ve studied it very closely.”
Trump sat with Breitbart News for nearly an hour last week for a wide-ranging interview that covered lots of topics including his trade and peace deal successes as well as his definition of the term “Panican” and this focus on AI. This answer on jobs and AI is particularly prescient now, too, as since the interview Trump has fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) who was appointed by his predecessor Democrat Joe Biden after that BLS director got several recent jobs reports incorrect.
How Trump handles the broader economy is a major focus right now of the nation and of the world, and markets are watching what he says and he does closely for clues about where trends are going.
The world is also quickly adjusting to the AI future, and how the U.S. government handles these questions and balances out these concerns like what the president is talking about will have wide-ranging impacts.
More from Trump’s latest exclusive interview with Breitbart News is forthcoming.