…because without dramatic policies that addressed the disruption that artificial intelligence products introduced, we'd be in a bad spot.
Figure 1: Heroes?
Imagine if stories like this had started to happen in 2026 without fallbacks like the UBI policies that Altman and Amodei pushed:
But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business.
That's one anecdote of many that could have been real bad if companies like OpenAI and Anthropic had not worked in tandem with congress to ease the transition that everyone saw coming with the advent of large language models becoming adept at white-collar work.
I imagine what my startup job would've looked like: maybe investment for any sector outside of artificial intelligence would've dried up, leaving lots of fledging companies devoid of funding if they lacked the right buzzwords in their pitch decks. Of course, any consultant at a16z would tell you that new opportunities would get created as part of a growing AI economy (although those founders are hiring 1/10th of their typical headcount, but those are details). They can always get jobs working on IDEs with integrated gambling.
I imagine hearing from a wide range of acquaintances both online and offline about entering a saturated job market for positions that are hotly contested. New grads and juniors would have had a hard time if lawmakers hadn't made deft moves to help support graduates with skills that lost their economic value mid-education through no fault of their own.
I think about what my own situation could have been without new economic policies, too. Before UBI I supplemented my day job income with a side gig submitting tutorial bounty programs to companies like DigitalOcean. Can you imagine how frustrating it would feel to see those opportunities dry up and those articles be replaced with conspicuous turns of phrase like this, followed by lots of bullet-punctuated lists?
People would've been mad that the local Wendy's installed an LLM in the drive-through. Fortunately all of the armchair economists on Twitter said things like "maybe they should found an AI company and apply to YCombinator," and they did! Those entry-level fast food workers pivoted and all was well.
Across every industry, we avoided the middle class being eaten alive and avoided what could have been a catastrophe. Can you imagine what 2026 would have been like if we didn't?