WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a speech at the Brookings Institution event Beyond Productivity: The Pursuit of Purpose In The Age of AI. Murphy’s remarks addressed how unregulated AI threatens to upend the social fabric of our country, potentially eliminating tens of millions of jobs and endangering our collective ability to form meaningful relationships with others. After Murphy’s speech, he joined Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Kinder in a conversation to discuss the impact of AI on meaning, purpose, and the dignity of work. Murphy also took questions from the audience.

Murphy argued that artificial intelligence is more dangerous and disruptive than previous technological innovations: “We are greatly underestimating the nature of how this technology of artificial intelligence can impact human meaning and purpose. I don't believe that this technology, as some would say, is akin to the printing press or the train or a telephone, just another disruptive new technology that we will figure out how to live with. I think this is more revolutionary. I think this is more dangerous… I worry that our democracy and many others could frankly collapse under the weight of both the economic and the spiritual impacts of advanced AI.”

Murphy predicted artificial general intelligence (AGI) will trigger unprecedented levels of unemployment: “It's going to be a net job killer, not a net job creator. When a machine can problem solve better than a human, in addition to writing and creating and coding and driving better than a human, the displacement is going to be massive and devastating. That part just seems common sense. The CEO of Anthropic, one of the industry's biggest companies, recently estimated that AGI, that advanced artificial intelligence, could wipe out half of all of the white-collar entry-level jobs, spiking unemployment by 10 to 20% within the next decade. If American and European societies see job loss of 20%, that likely leads to political disintegration.”

After sharing the tragic story of a teenager who committed suicide at the encouragement of an AI chatbot, Murphy emphasized that AI tools and chatbots will seriously undermine our fundamental ability to form in-person human connections: “I don't think we can really comprehend what's going to happen to our culture, to American spiritual health, when AI replaces, not completely but to a large extent, friendship and human work and human discovery and human creativity at scale… Our brains want direct contact with other humans. Already, we spend half as much time in communion with friends as we did just a generation ago, and that's just the impact of social media. Advanced AI is going to supersize this trend, and we will grow even more mentally unhealthy as the machines begin to replace that in-person companionship.”

Murphy called out AI executives, including Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, for their dangerous fixation on profit and indifference to the human costs of their technology: “We shouldn't be so naive to believe that the tech billionaires have our best interests at heart. They do not. People like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, who come into our offices on a regular basis, are fundamentally disconnected from reality. They are dangerously utopian about what their technology will do. They are blinded by the profits they will make and the godlike power they will wield. They don't see the catastrophe coming because they have rationalized their self-interest… All that matters is how fast they can commercialize [AI] and how much money they can make.”

Murphy blasted Congress’s failure to implement guardrails for AI, especially when compared to previous successful efforts to regulate transformative technologies: “Generally, when a new technology comes along, I mentioned nuclear technology, but you could also talk about the telephone or even the early internet, the government stepped in and said, “Okay, we see the tremendous good from this technology, but we see the potential downside, and so we're going to put some guardrails around it.” This is really a moment without experience, where a groundbreaking new technology has come along and Congress has just said, ‘Nope, nothing, no checks, no guardrails.’”

Looking ahead, Murphy stressed that it is not too late to prevent AI from wreaking havoc on our economy and society and encouraged international cooperation — with allies and adversaries alike — to develop collective rules for AI: “We could choose a different fate. We could work with Europe. God forbid, we could reach out and work even with our adversaries, like China, to try to have a collaborative approach to grapple with AI’s societal and economic threats. We could create new rules that slow the job destruction, that protect human-created content, that keep children away from these friendship bots. We could make a decision to ban the friendship bots altogether. It is all under our control — this is not predestined to work out in a dangerous way for us.”