Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo discussed the best and worst scenarios for AI employment on CNBC, stating that her organization Raise Us is working with states and companies to prepare for potential disruptions in the labor market before the worst-case scenario occurs.

Her public statement is: the issue is not the technology but the lack of a transition plan, expressing concern for the next two to five years, with layoffs potentially spreading across the economy quickly; estimates suggest tens of millions of Americans are in jobs vulnerable to AI impacts. In a TED talk, she mentioned that if the focus is solely on winning in chips and models while displacing millions of workers, it amounts to automating recession, and that recession and social unrest will ultimately lead to excessive regulation that stifles innovation. A guest article in The New York Times stated that the U.S. cannot afford the economic shock she sees approaching.

She co-founded the bipartisan nonprofit Raise Us with former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, which has raised over $500 million with a goal of $1 billion. Pilot states include Arkansas, Maryland, Utah, and Connecticut, with projects including job matching, service years, and wage insurance trials. The advisory and funding list includes Paul Ryan, Stephen Schwarzman, labor unions, economists David Autor, Erik Brynjolfsson, Raj Chetty, as well as the nonprofit parent organizations of Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI. A Boston Consulting Group analysis estimated that up to 25 million jobs could disappear in the next five years, with about half of jobs being reshaped.

She opposes replacing safety with European-style regulation and denies that universal basic income alone can offset unemployment; she advocates for employers to define skills and resettlement pathways, with government funding for training and safety nets. Her father losing his factory job in the 1980s is a personal reference she frequently cites. The official language at the White House lunch on the same day was self-discipline and not stifling.

In market mechanisms, the risk hedge being bought is that "failure to transition could lead to political violence and overly strict legislation," while what is being sold is state pilot programs and corporate retraining budgets. Funding comes from donations by charities and tech companies to the nonprofit, rather than entering unemployment insurance legislation; beneficiaries are platforms that must prove they have invested in worker transitions, while those under pressure are publicly traded companies that drive up stock prices through layoffs, which she identifies as misaligned incentives. The event driver is television interviews, not new official unemployment rates.

New jobs are acknowledged by her to emerge, but the time lag is the variable: layoffs happen before new jobs are created, and without a plan in between, it could lead to recession and backlash regulation. Raise Us frames this time lag as a pilot state laboratory rather than a federal brake.

Source: Public Information