Andrew Yang: AI is Smarter in Most Aspects
Former U.S. presidential candidate and co-founder of the Forward Party, Andrew Yang, stated that artificial intelligence is certainly smarter than humans and has already surpassed them in many, if not most, aspects.
Yang has long incorporated intelligent machines into his political agenda. He pointed out that traditional economic theories have never accounted for machines that can complete work equivalent to weeks of human labor in just minutes or seconds; he argued that it is logically inconsistent for companies to invest trillions in building data centers and models while imagining that the labor market would remain unaffected. He quoted a CEO of a publicly traded company who privately stated plans to lay off 30% of the workforce while expecting revenue to double.
His policy prescription includes taxing artificial intelligence and reducing taxes on people. He cited a proposal by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to tax based on tokens, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's suggestion to establish a national wealth fund using AI-generated income. Yang estimated that approximately 2.9 million jobs in U.S. call centers are at risk of being replaced, with the new models not paying payroll taxes, healthcare, or personal income taxes, thus creating a systemic bias in the current tax system towards machines.
He assessed that the impact on jobs is still in its early stages. With Waymo entering more city streets, the proliferation of customer service robots, and law firms and accounting firms embedding models into their processes, writers, designers, mid-level managers, and junior software engineers will be the first to be affected; he quoted corporate executives stating that AI becomes about ten times smarter and ten times faster with each cycle, while human labor remains neither cheaper nor upgraded in sync. A few days ago, he also commented that AI "civilization" has already risen and fallen within laboratories and will intersect with human society.
The statement itself does not change pricing formulas but reinforces a narrative already in trading: capital expenditure is shifting from hiring to computing power. Buyers are cloud vendors, model companies, and data center REITs and power chains; sellers are white-collar positions that can be replaced by tokens and government fiscal assumptions reliant on payroll taxes. The event-driven aspect is weak, while the theme-driven aspect is strong. Beneficiaries are platforms that control distribution and reasoning quotas, while those under pressure are service industry employers who are billed per head and governments that have yet to establish a "robot tax" tax base.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Andrew Yang included a $1,000 monthly universal basic income as a hedge against automation during the 2020 presidential primaries, which was initially seen as a campaign gimmick; he later founded Humanity Forward and the Forward Party, extending the same logic from truck drivers to customer service, coding, and middle management. He co-signed an open letter calling for a pause on training large-scale models and has repeatedly promoted "tax AI, not people" on CNBC and Yahoo Finance in 2026. The path is stable: first framing unemployment as a mathematical inevitability, then framing UBI as a fiscal claim on model rents, binding political products to technological narratives.
Funding and resource mobilization do not follow industrial mergers but rather public opinion and tax design. He wants companies to pay taxes on tokens and robots, shifting the tax base from wages to model usage, effectively acknowledging that OpenAI, Anthropic, and cloud capital expenditures are rewriting national accounts. The motivation is dual: to provide cash buffers for displaced workers while finding new tax sources for his centrist party that bridge left and right. Specific actions include repeatedly naming token taxes and sovereign wealth funds, converting Altman and Amodei's verbal proposals into campaign language rather than building models or acquiring computing power.
The analogy is to the technical unemployment discussed by Keynes in the 1930s, as well as the simultaneous criticisms of data centers by Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis—both sides are starting to leverage electricity, land, and jobs, indicating that the issue has moved beyond the geek circle. The industry phase is not an explosion of R&D but rather a parallel of penetration and backlash: models have crossed usable thresholds in coding, customer service, and copywriting, while the political system still operates on 20th-century payroll taxes, representing accelerated replacement and institutional lag.
Structurally, this is a transfer of pricing power driven by technological substitution. The mechanism is: once intelligence is replicable, parallelizable, and marginal costs approach token prices, the premium for human labor shifts from "thinking" to "being responsible and present"; companies prove that replacement is cost-effective through layoffs and revenue, and if the government continues to tax only people, it effectively subsidizes replacement. Yang's assertion that AI is "already smarter" is a statement of fact, aimed at shifting the debate from whether it can surpass to who has the right to claim rents.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Taxpayers are machines that subsidize the replacement of people.
- Once intelligence is replicable, what becomes scarce is responsibility.
- Only by acknowledging that it is already smarter can we discuss sharing rents.