Trump and Artificial Intelligence

Liberalism is a “heap of ethical rubbish” for the far right in the United States (US). After defeating the Democrats, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, has declared war against the Republican Party establishment. Bannon, who considers himself an agent of change, is set to purge liberals and globalists from his own party. Trump–Bannon’s anti-liberal rhetoric seeks to rekindle white nationalism, “break the world system and increase US military–corporate power” (Parmar 2017a). The racist duo neither opposes the US empire nor global capitalism, their wrath is directed against the Washington elite who have been running capitalism’s grand show for almost a century. Bannon, in a recent speech at Washington, blamed liberals and not capitalism for shifting factories and jobs to Asia in the 1980s and creating “gutted communities and opioid addicts” in the US (Bannon 2017). The time has come for the decrepit old guard to hang up their boots.

Bannon’s speech also referred to the unprecedented challenge that mankind is expected to confront in the coming 20 years due to “the convergence of biotechnology, artificial intelligence [AI], the computer chip” (Bannon 2017). This is probably the first time that someone from Trump’s team has acknowledged the threat from AI. Although, in March, Steven Mnuchin, the US treasury secretary, told the press that he was “not worried at all” about robots displacing humans in the near future and that AI was “50–100 more years away” (Reid 2017). Trump is yet to tweet about the impact of AI on jobs. He knows that his promise of creating jobs is humbug, it is only a vote-garnering device. Trump is no Luddite, he will not even try to halt the march of technology or harm capitalism in order to restore jobs in factories and offices. In his heart, Trump is probably thanking the liberals for shifting jobs out of the US and inadvertently preparing Americans for the onslaught of joblessness that lies ahead.