Jon Stewart is worried about the future.
In a “Weekly Show” podcast episode timed to Earth Day on Wednesday, Stewart said that while there are several “existential threats” in the age of Donald Trump, there is one that’s getting less attention than it should.
“As this glorious Earth is being celebrated while simultaneously being destroyed on the back end of it, I thought it would be appropriate not to worry about Iran, not to worry about climate change, but to worry about a third existential threat, which is AI—artificial intelligence,” the host said, which is “building data centers and sucking up water and electricity and money” with little interference from the Trump administration.
In December, Trump signed an executive order that limited regulations on artificial intelligence.
Stewart said, “What’s gone wrong with the economic condition in this country is that labor has never been offered an ownership stake in the value of their productivity,” which has been made worse by the Trump administration’s cozying up with “powerful corporations,” he said.
“What they do with the profits is they reinvest not just in their technologies, but in their political power. So they take their money, and they bring it to bear on Washington,” he explained.
“It was a shocking moment to me at the inauguration of an American president to see, in the front row in a room of the swearing in, not the people, but the tech companies that had the closest proximity and access to the president,” he added, pointing out that Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were prominent guests at Trump’s second inauguration.
“Those powerful corporations have, there’s almost that they have us at an extortion point where they say, you know, ‘Oh, if you try and do anything to regulate us or you try and do anything to tax us, we’ll leave,’” Stewart explained.
Trump’s relationship with those companies costs Americans some of the benefits of the technology and more of its downsides, Stewart surmised, as one of his expert guests added, “We have this incredibly powerful technology that sits just on the horizon, but we have a political system that is unable to articulate mostly anything but platitudes.”
“When you have an economic system that requires labor at its cheapest level, and you have outside pressure of globalization that continues to drive those wages down and conditions down, well, we’ve created the conditions for that permanent underclass,” Stewart said. “And then we blame those people as though their poverty is a function of vice, is a function of a lack of virtue.”
After all, power-grabbing and shaming the have-nots is a quintessential part of the MAGA ideology, Stewart concluded, as he agreed with a guest who said, “You cannot understand the rise of Trump, the rise of anger in this country, without that meritocracy ideology,” and Trump has “been the most eloquent describer of this.”
