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Talking about Artificial Intelligence can feel intimidating due to technical complexity, but it actually isn’t if you ground the conversation in your own experience. AI is affecting all of us, and as it impacts our lives we need to be empowered to have these conversations amongst our friends, family members, and broader community. Currently, conversations about AI are being driven by the tech giants who have insider knowledge, have invested years in knowing how AI works and the complex ins and outs of its programming, and they are deeply invested in an opinion that supports AI adoption and mass integration. They have invested billions of dollars into this idea, and are deeply biased.
Us everyday people on the ground, we are experts in our lived experience, and our perspectives, those outside of insider industry knowledge, are very important! We need to join the conversation, especially when our lives and the lives of those we love are directly impacted.
As you begin to have these conversations with your community, we hope this talking point guide can empower and encourage you. Thank you for doing this important work!
Reminders:
Reminders:
It's OK to not know everything about AI. (It is literally developing faster than even experts admit they can keep up with!)
It's OK to say "I don't know." The purpose of these conversations is to engage other people, and spark questions.
Talking Points about the AI Workforce Disruption Report
Talking Points about the AI Workforce Disruption Report
Scale of Disruption: AI is on track to disrupt 45 million U.S. jobs by 2028 — roughly one in four. This is an economic upheaval not seen in a century.
Rapid Acceleration: Unlike previous technological shifts, AI is advancing at breakneck speed — adoption curves measured in months, not decades — giving workers, companies, and policymakers little time to adapt.
Added Fear for Economic Security to Everyday People: Inflation, Rising Cost of Living, and other challenges to making ends meet, this increases everyone’s level of fear for their sense of security to provide for themselves and their families.
Beyond Blue Collar: Unlike past automation, AI is advancing into white-collar and cognitive work — education, healthcare, finance, customer service — not just physical labor.
Career Ladder Effect: Roles that once provided mobility into the middle class — retail managers, HR coordinators, admin assistants — are now highly vulnerable. Without intervention, career pathways collapse.
This issue is a unique challenge young college graduates are impacted by.
Limits of Retraining: Historical evidence shows retraining alone often pushes workers into lower-wage jobs, leading to long-term income loss.
Coding used to be a promising secure job to pursue, but now AI can code. Being an “AI Prompt Engineer” was a ‘new job’ provided by AI technology and now AI can create better prompts faster.
Skills That Last: Human-centric abilities — empathy, adaptability, creativity, ethics — are the most resilient against automation.
Urgency: Policymakers must act before the window closes. This analysis uses one of the last comprehensive, independent workforce datasets available — clarity before political or corporate spin obscures reality
How the AI Impact on Jobs Report is Compiled
How the AI Impact on Jobs Report is Compiled
Data Sources: Based on 745 occupations across 20 major U.S. industries using U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET database and NAICS classifications.
Disruption & Creation Scores: Each role was scored for likelihood of automation (AI Disruption Score) and potential for new tasks/roles (AI Creation Score).Net Impact: Combined into an AI Impact Score (Disruption minus Creation), then weighted by industry size and employment share.
Sector Findings: Retail (6.6M jobs), Healthcare (6.4M), Education (4.6M), and Finance (2.2M) face the highest disruption.
Why do we need Universal Basic Income?
Why do we need Universal Basic Income?
Policy Parallel: Just as Social Security stabilized families during the Great Depression, the problems of today requires a bold modern stabilizer — Universal Basic Income.
UBI as Solution:
UBI provides security, agency, and a foundation for innovation. With it, people can retrain, start businesses, or care for family while navigating disruption.
AI is disrupting the volume of available jobs at unpredictable rates. This permanent alteration to our economy means there must be a path forward for how individuals can secure the income they need for themselves and their families to survive.
UBI as Dividend: AI is built on collective human effort — UBI ensures everyone shares in its gains.
Economic Stability: Without stabilizers, mass disruption risks collapsing consumer demand and slowing growth. Report highlights retail (6.6M jobs) and healthcare (6.4M) as most at risk — these are core consumer-driven sectors.
Already Necessary: AI is an additional alarming factor that adds to a system already unable to support individuals. Basic Income has been important to implement in order to address social issues, AI makes this increasingly urgent to implement.
No Community Consent: If a Data Center is going to consume critical resources like water and energy, which will raise utility bills on local community members, and then also have detrimental effects on the community’s air quality, these projects should be proposed to the community first.
Insult to Injury - It’s happening on your dime too!: Not only are these being planned for and built without the taxpayer’s approval, governments are subsidizing these projects with taxpayer dollars that could be going to important public services such as education, and other investments for the public.
Data Centers are raising your electricity bills: These data centers require a huge amount of electricity to run. These get passed onto local consumers through “Supply Charges”.
In hot spots like North Virginia, bills on average are expected to go up 25%!
Who’s Profiting from this?:
Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Meta.
Others are less well-known, like Equinix, Digital Realty, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, SAP, Iron Mountain, and Coreweave.
Oracle, founded by Trump supporter and former Tesla board member Larry Ellison
OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman is major Trump ally
SoftBank, whose CEO Masayoshi Son, in a press conference with Trump, committed to investing up to $200 billion in the U.S.
Crusoe Energy Systems, whose shareholders include Peter Thiel, the Winklevoss twins, and former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias; the latter three were major contributors to Elon Musk’s America PAC for Trump’s 2024 candidacy.
The False Promise of Job Creation:
Companies justify tax breaks for data centers with the promise of new jobs, but data centers create 100 times fewer jobs than other types of economic development, ranked by the amount of energy used
Data Centers require more jobs to build the Data Center, but once it’s running, fewer than 100 workers are needed.
Data Centers Hurt our Climate Progress: Their power consumption adds emissions to our environment that pollutes our air and consumes finite natural resources such as our clean drinking water.
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