Will AI cost jobs? Short answer: yes. Long answer: also yes — regardless of whether the datacenters sit in the United States or in China. Jobs will vanish. American jobs included. There is nothing to be done about that. Once a technology’s time has come, resistance is a feel-good gesture, not a strategy.
So perhaps it’s better to have the datacenters at home if the consequences are unavoidable anyway. At least then the secondary effects — capital formation, infrastructure, tax base — remain local. Outsourcing the damage rarely improves the outcome.
But there is another metric quietly grinding away beneath all of this, and sooner or later it will start to bite even the United States: demographics. Populations are shrinking. Across almost the entire developed world. Some slowly, some rapidly, and some — like China — catastrophically so. The world, however, still wants its comforts. And a declining number of people means declining growth unless something intervenes.
On a personal level, I would find the end of growth rather meaningful. Peaceful, even. But I have no illusion that the majority population will play along. They won’t. Which means politicians — ever attuned to the crowd’s fickleness — will demand solutions. Preferably ones that don’t require sacrifice.AI will take the edge off that pain. And, inevitably, it will create new ones. That is not a failure of the system. That is the system. It has worked that way since life first crawled out of the mud.