Artificial intelligence and robotics are about to wipe out tens of millions of American jobs — including hundreds of thousands right here in Minnesota — and the old conservative talking points we’ve used since Reagan are not going to save us.
Even Bernie Sanders gets it. The Vermont socialist just penned a long piece in The Guardian quoting Elon Musk (“AI will make all jobs optional”), Bill Gates (“humans won’t be needed for most things”), and the CEO of Anthropic warning that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs are toast.
The numbers are brutal: projections show AI and automation could erase nearly 100 million U.S. jobs in the next decade. That includes 47% of truck drivers (think every long-haul rig rolling up I-94), 64% of accountants (goodbye, tax season in Edina), and almost 90% of fast-food workers (sayonara, Culver’s drive-thru on a Friday night in Mankato).
Minnesota isn’t immune. We’ve got 50,000+ truckers, tens of thousands in manufacturing, and an entire healthcare industry already leaning hard on algorithms. When the robots show up, those paychecks disappear overnight.
And here’s what keeps me awake: the classic conservative response — “government can’t create jobs, only the private sector can” — stops working when the private sector no longer needs human beings.
For 40 years we’ve beaten socialists over the head with one killer argument:
“You can’t have a ‘right’ to housing or healthcare because that forces other human beings to pay for it. That’s slavery with extra steps.”
That argument is 100% correct … right up until the moment the cotton is picked by robots instead of people.
When the value is created by machines that nobody is morally entitled to “free” from forced labor, the entire moral foundation of the redistribution debate flips. Suddenly “tax the robots and send everyone a check” doesn’t sound like theft. It sounds like common sense to a dad in Brooklyn Park who just lost his warehouse job to a Boston Dynamics bot.
I already see it in the polling. A huge chunk of the same working-class Minnesotans who flipped the Iron Range red and gave Donald Trump every swing state in 2024 tell pollsters they’re warming to socialist policies, especially if they’re young.
These aren’t dorm-room Marxists. These are the guys in Carhartt jackets who used to vote DFL because of the union, then switched to Trump because the Democrats went woke. They’re pragmatic, not ideological. And when their livelihood evaporates, pragmatism says, “Feed my kids first, argue about Ayn Rand later.”
If Republicans keep reciting 1984 talking points in a 2030 world, we will lose Minnesota for another generation.
I don’t have the complete answer yet — nobody does — but I know pretending this isn’t happening is not a strategy.
We have to go back to first principles and ask the question few on the right have begun to contemplate:
How do we defend private property, individual liberty, and limited government when abundance is created by machines instead of men?
Because if we don’t figure that out — and fast — the Left will nationalize the robots, tax their output at 95%, and mail every Minnesotan a government check while they lecture us about equity.
And the guy who just lost his job at the 3M plant in Alexandria won’t care about your Heritage Foundation white paper. He’ll care that his kids are eating.
The first wave of mass AI layoffs are expected to hit in about 18 months.
We’d better have an answer that protects liberty and still keeps people from starving — or the Democrats will write the only answer anyone hears.
Rep. Walter Hudson is a Republican who represents District 30A in the Minnesota House of Representatives.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not represent an official position of Alpha News.
Rep. Walter Hudson
Rep. Walter Hudson is a Republican state representative from Albertville.
