Former US presidential candidate Andrew Yang says the rapid rise of AI should force governments to rethink how labor and automation are taxed.
In a new CNBC interview, the founder of Noble Mobile says one company selling autonomous coding systems is witnessing explosive growth.
According to Yang, many software developers could be displaced if the trend continues.
“There was one company that’s selling autonomous coding for enterprises to big businesses, and their revenue is up 100-fold in the last 12 months. So if that continues, it’s going to eat a lot of the tech budgets from major corporations that used to go to humans. And so you’re seeing the employment of recent computer science graduates fall off a cliff from a lot of programs.”
Yang also says that, based on what he’s seeing, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is right about the scale of job displacement amid automation.
“Look, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, laid it out very clearly, and he’s been doing so repeatedly, saying we’re going to automate away up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next several years, and I believe him. The easiest people to fire are the people you haven’t hired yet, which again is why you see the hiring of recent college graduates heading down, and the underemployment rate is over 50%. The unemployment rate among college graduates is now the same or higher than that of non-college graduates for the first time in history.”
To address the potential economic disruption, Yang says policymakers should focus on taxing AI agents.
“You tend to tax things that you want to discourage, that you want less of, and we’re going to be in a position where we want to shore up labor in every quarter, in every organization and environment. We should actually try to stop taxing labor…
And by the way, Dario Amodei, in the second half of his statement, said, ‘We’re going to automate away the white-collar jobs, and you should tax us.’ And since when does the CEO of a major company raise his hand and say, ‘Hey, tax me and mine?’ Because he sees the writing on the wall, and he knows that there’s this massive backlash coming their way.”
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