Rep. Greg Casar Slams AI Leaders’ Vision of Mass Unemployment

In an interview with MeidasTouch, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus argued that the tech industry is actively courting a future where unemployment levels reach 10% to 20%. Casar, who recently partnered with Senator Bernie Sanders to introduce legislation aiming to restrict AI models that surpass human cognition, insisted that this shift is not an inevitable consequence of progress but a calculated strategy to consolidate wealth.

Casar specifically targeted the industry's reliance on universal basic income as a solution to the displacement of workers. While acknowledging that shorter work hours could benefit society, he dismissed the Silicon Valley approach of using small stipends to make high unemployment palatable as fundamentally exploitative. Drawing parallels to the Gilded Age, he urged the public to resist the influence of figures like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, arguing that democracy must reclaim power from corporate interests before they succeed in capturing government institutions.