The US economy added 172,000 jobs in May, crushing expectations of 85,000. The unemployment rate was 4.3%, in line with expectations of 4.3%. April’s jobs number was also revised UP by +64,000 jobs. This marks the second-strongest US jobs report in 13 months. The job apocalypse has not happened.

David Sacks writes about a worse problem: The Nationalization of AI.

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.

The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.

Conservatives have another fear.

The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities.

Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book. Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.

Dario and Sam [Anthropic] have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.

I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax. There’s just one problem.

Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward.

Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI—a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.

We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).

That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian.

AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality—with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.

America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S.—and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.

Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed, but ought to think more carefully about how the regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

Stephen L. Miller responded:

It’s not that hard. The left lets institutions and communities break down to a point of total degradation to prove why more government and non-profits are the answer. The goal is to purposely not solve problems and make life and safety worse. See the entire defund the police movement and homelessness nonprofits in California. Gavin Newsom promised to end homelessness, and instead, it ballooned on purpose.

This is why there was such an enormous flip-out over Trump renovating the reflecting pool or Spencer Pratt’s campaign.

Once people realize that things can be improved, a lot of nonprofits and public unions/money dries up.

There is a reason why cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and now Denver all look the same: because they are all run by the same people running the exact same scam.

Mostly, the concern I see on the political right over AI is cultural because there’s nothing more that the political left and the Democratic Party want than for them to get their claws into AI.

Because once an AI is programmed to tell people that boys can become girls, it’s the death of truth. Data centers being built isn’t the problem; the data in those data centers is.