I attended Sen. Merkley’s recent town hall to ask about federal Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation. When he asked who was worried about AI, every hand in the room went up.
Merkley’s response focused on deepfakes and Congress’s own education — AI briefing sessions that never existed before, AI-generated election content. That’s a start, but it misses the scale of what’s coming.
I’m an in-house recruiter at a global tech company. We get new AI tools constantly. A recent company-wide objective is to triple our output using AI. In the near future, one recruiter will do the work of three, and our team of five becomes one or two people managing the former workload of five people.
This is white collar workforce displacement at scale. It will also happen to factory workers. And customer service representatives, paralegals, accountants, writers, graphic designers, radiologists, software engineers, and on and on. Any role that involves routine analysis, content creation, data processing, or decision-making is on the table. The difference from past automation waves is speed and scope. This isn’t one industry over decades. This is every industry simultaneously.
And when it happens, those jobs are gone forever. This will further shrink the middle class, widen the wealth gap, transfer even more power to the elite few who own the technology — while millions are suddenly without work and struggling to find footing in a wildly over-turned workforce.
We’ve learned what happens to a society when millions lose work suddenly. During COVID, we watched it in real time — the mental health crisis, the empty days without structure or purpose, the desperation when income streams disappeared overnight. People struggled with isolation, depression, and loss of identity. But COVID had an endpoint. The vaccine came, and some version of normalcy returned.
AI workforce displacement has no endpoint. There is no vaccine coming to restore those jobs.
This kind of government latency isn’t new. I’ve seen it happen twice in my lifetime. Climate scientists warned about global warming in the 1970s. By the time the government acted, we’d locked in irreversible damage. When social media came into society, it took us 20 years to understand the social impact. By that time, we had a generation drowning in depression and isolation. Australia took action and banned it for kids under 16 — but that just happened last year.
AI is evolving exponentially faster than either of those. My company is one of many that is actively working toward massive efficiency gains that mean fewer humans. Amazon just laid off 16,000 people. This is happening over an already destabilized employer market leftover from COVID. We’re heading into something significantly more destabilizing, and Congress is still “learning about it.”
Meanwhile, companies producing AI tools are three, four, five steps ahead of what the government is only trying to “learn.”
AI regulation is broad — deepfakes, misinformation, workforce displacement, R&D over-sight. But the workforce piece is urgent. Without proactive intervention, we’re looking at a hollowed-out middle class, mass displacement, and no social safety nets in place. We need guardrails on development, taxation models for displaced workers, and robust social programs for a transition already underway.
This is not a future problem. This is happening now and requires immediate government intervention.
The question isn’t whether AI will reshape society. It’s whether government acts before or after the damage is done. Based on climate and social media, we’re on track to be a day late and a dollar short. We can’t afford a 20-year learning curve on this issue.
If you’re worried about AI, write Sens. Merkley and Wyden. Tell them workforce displacement matters. Help make this a political priority in Oregon this year.
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Katie Crafts is a longtime Hood River resident who has spent much of her career recruiting for tech startups and global companies. She has hired teams in North America, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and had a front-row seat to the workforce upheaval that followed COVID. She has also coached dozens of mid-career professionals through industry transitions and career reinventions. She’s no stranger to that herself, having spent five years working in Antarctica and the Arctic in the middle of her recruiting career — because sometimes you just need a change of scenery.
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