Rent Seeking As Trump hits the asphalt with a bevy of executive orders, it’s becoming clearer what he and his tech bro buddies imagine for the future of US labor: AI doing jobs instead of people, which could be very bad for US workers. News of Trump’s $500 billion AI infrastructure project Stargate has spawned a swarm of questions from friends and critics alike. His chief frenemy Elon Musk, for example, is questioning where the money will come from, while New Scientist tech analyst Jeremy Hsu has questions about the venture’s energy consumption. But the question that’s probably most important for the American people is: how will this impact employment? The official line is that the unprecedented AI program will create “hundreds of thousands of American jobs,” as declared by Trump well before the project is even funded. While carving out the Central Park-sized data center may create some temporary construction jobs, though, the entire venture is a bet on the opposite — that AI will become so ubiquitous that it will take over economically meaningful amounts of work from humans, especially knowledge workers. As senior writer Kelsey Piper pines in Vox, the “only plausible way for investors to get their money back on this project is if, as the company has been betting, OpenAI will soon develop AI systems that can do most work humans can do on a computer.” “[That] we will replace all office work with AI,” quips Piper, “which is fairly widely understood to be OpenAI’s business model — is an absurd…A Key Trump Goal Emerges: Replacing Human Jobs With AI