Khanna Asks Elon Musk If He's OK With Billionaire Tax After Latest Claims About AI and Mass Layoffs

Rep. Ro Khanna put the world's richest man on the spot on Friday after Elon Musk acknowledged that artificial intelligence and robotics advancements in the future would lead to mass layoffs for human workers.

In a social media post, Musk, the tech billionaire and right-wing ally to President Donald Trump, acknowledged that AI would lead to disruption in the labor market, but claimed that a guaranteed universal income program could make up for it.

"Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI," Musk wrote. "AI/robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation."

Khanna, however, responded to Musk's post by arguing that any universal income program should be at least partly funded by the billionaire tech CEOs who are becoming even richer thanks to AI.

"In that case, are you willing to pay a modest trillionaire and billionaire tax to pay for checks to working families?" Khanna asked. "We could start with the modest $3000 check Bernie Sanders and I have proposed for families under $150,000?"

Both Khanna and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for months have been talking about the potential threats AI poses to working people, especially if it replaces human labor.

During a roundtable discussion with Sanders and author Naomi Klein on Tuesday, Khanna likened AI to the technological advances made during the Industrial Revolution, which saw historic gains in productivity, but also in inequality.

"If you look at the Industrial Revolution, for 60 years, worker wages fell... even as Britain became wealthy," Khanna explained. "And so the question, in my view, for AI is, are we going to let a few billionaires, trillionaires, call the shots, or are we going to make sure that the technology is actually used in any way to enhance workers, to enhance total productivity?"

Sanders flagged Amazon founder Jeff Bezos seeking to raise $100 billion to automate US factories with AI-powered robots as a particularly dangerous threat to the livelihoods of blue-collar workers.

"It means there will no longer be manufacturing jobs in the United States or in warehouses,” Sanders said of Bezos' plan. “He wants to get rid of the 600,000 Amazon workers and replace them with robots. Elon Musk is converting Tesla partially to a robotics company. He wants to produce a million robots a year… What do you think a robot is there for? It’s to replace a union worker.”

Sanders on Friday continued banging the drum about billionaires' plans for AI, and he slammed members of the Democratic Party who are reportedly wary of criticizing the industry publicly for fear of its enormous campaign war chest that it's planning to deploy during the upcoming midterm elections.

"With the AI industry planning to spend $300 million this election cycle," Sanders wrote on social media, "Democrats are being pressured by consultants to avoid 'antagonizing' them. Unacceptable. Democrats must get super PACS out of their primaries. Citizens United must be overturned. We must have the courage to take on the AI Oligarchs."