Pete Buttigieg has a warning about AI

A potential presidential contender advises against “fighting the last war.”

NPR’s interview with Pete Buttigieg made some news this week: The once and possibly future presidential contender talked of his party’s need to shift its focus for future elections.

He said Democrats should argue against the status quo, and even suggested that some federal agencies targeted by President Trump may not have been perfect to begin with: “It is unconscionable that children were left to die by the abrupt destruction of USAID. Unconscionable. But it's also wrong to suppose that if Democrats come back to power, our project should be to just tape the pieces together just the way that they were.”

This was one of NPR’s all-platform interviews, which are for Morning Edition on the radio, the Up First podcast, a special podcast episode and video on YouTube and other platforms. We’ve had a range of voices in the series: AOC, Steve Bannon, Alan Garber, Dave Portnoy, and Zohran Mamdani.

Buttigieg talked about a lot, and the audience took note of his approach to Jeffrey Epstein, trans kids in sports and other hot buttons.

He also mocked Trump’s cabinet secretaries, including Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who mistakenly promoted the idea of “A-1 instruction” in schools in a public appearance. She appeared to be referring to AI, artificial intelligence, but showed a less than complete grasp of the topic.

Less noticed was Buttigieg’s warning about AI. I’ll reproduce some of our conversation here, edited slightly for length and clarity.

BUTTIGIEG: Certainly my party right now is vulnerable to the temptation to fight the last war. To think about the last campaign, and we should learn from the last campaign. But we are already in a dramatically different world than we were six months ago, let alone four years ago. And that's about to change that much more, in my opinion, because of the rise of artificial intelligence. And I think even now. Even though it's a hot topic and people are discussing it all the time, there's a lot of hype. I think even now we are under reacting in a big way, politically and substantively to what this is about to do to us as a country.

INSKEEP: What's the danger?

BUTTIGIEG: In addition to the dangers that do get talked about a lot, the apocalyptic scenarios, the economic implications are the ones that I think could be the most disruptive, the most quickly. We're talking about whole categories of jobs. Not in 30 or 40 years, but in three or four, half of the entry level jobs might not be there. And if that happens as quickly as it might happen, it'll be a bit like what I lived through as a kid in the industrial Midwest when trade in automation sucked away a lot of the auto jobs in the nineties—but ten times, maybe 100 times more disruptive because it's happening on a more widespread basis and it's happening more quickly.

INSKEEP: And you don't think that we're really reacting to that? We talk about it, but we're not doing anything.

BUTTIGIEG: I don't think are asking big enough questions about what we would do if that many jobs got disrupted. We're talking about changes that might be bigger and faster than anything we've seen since the 17th century. The Industrial Revolution was before the United States existed. And yeah I think I think we're under reacting to that.

INSKEEP: So what do you do about that? Do you seize the moment? Do you try to stop everything? Do you try to regulate artificial intelligence, which is something that states are doing, but the federal government has only discussed? How do you approach it?

BUTTIGIEG: So I don't think there's such a thing as stopping it. I think it's happening. It's developing, by the way. It's not just developing in the US, it's developing in China and a lot of other places. So lots of people are working toward more and more sophisticated versions of the software. It's just not realistic to believe you can stop it. I do think that safety regulation is important, but I also think that if that was all we were doing, we would be missing the piece that I'm talking about, that I think politics and policy need to come up with answers on fast, which is the displacement, because that's not a question of how you regulate a piece of technology.

It's a question of how we make sure that our economy is one where people can still thrive when they're going through these disruptions. There's a world where it could go very well if the right choices are made. The result of this could theoretically be a shorter workweek for all of us and more money in our pocket. But we've been promised that before, and often the opposite has happened. And it's entirely possible that the rise of artificial intelligence will put even more power and concentrate even more wealth in even fewer hands at a moment when we're already in a crisis of inequality and just how concentrated that has become.

Buttigieg is talking about a technology that could accelerate the concentration of wealth: eliminating people’s jobs in favor of tech that, in theory, could be controlled by very few people.

When AI moved to the center of public conversation in 2022, many U.S. lawmakers said it was the most important issue of their lifetimes, and spoke of the urgent need for policies that applied to it. Since then lawmakers have done little, and in the recent budget bill almost imposed a 10-year ban on regulation by states that have acted in various ways.

As you can see, Buttigieg doubts that regulation is the full answer that he seeks. What he worries about is the growth of a power that is beyond the ability of democratic government to contend with. He is concerned that

Some of the things that are underway and about to accelerate, like the rise of artificial intelligence, will create completely novel challenges that the next round of American leadership will have to contend with, that even the intense persona and concentrated power that Donald Trump represents cannot respond to on today's terms.