While most debates about artificial intelligence (AI) center on automation and job loss, Vice President J.D. Vance recently sounded the alarm about its role in the breakdown of human relationships and the risk of ceding technological dominance to China.
What Happened: In a conversation with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance downplayed anxieties about mass job losses, claiming instead that AI has the potential to enhance human productivity.
"On the economic side, the main concern that I have with A.I. is not of the obsolescence," he said. "I think what might actually happen is that truck drivers are able to work more efficient hours. They're both safer and they're able to get higher wages."
To Vance, the cultural and emotional effects of AI are more concerning: "Where I really worry about this is in pretty much everything noneconomic," he said, describing a society in which young people find it difficult to develop relationships, referring to the role of technology in dampening intimacy and connection.
"Our young men and women just aren't dating, and if they're not dating, they're not getting married, they're not starting families."
He went on to ask: "Does it mean that there are millions of American teenagers talking to chatbots who don't have their best interests at heart?" Speaking about the long-lasting effects of AI-driven relationships, he said: "Compared to a chatbot, a normal human interaction is not going to be as satisfying, because human beings have wants and needs."
Notably, Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt echoed similar concerns in a recent interview, alleging that AI will “exacerbate” people’s propensity to confuse life online with life offline.
On the national security front, Vance painted a concerning picture of AI's power to upset everything from cybersecurity to outer space. "We could wake up very soon in a world where there is no cybersecurity," he said. "Where there's weird s*** happening in space mediated through A.I. that makes our communications infrastructure either actively hostile or at least largely inept and inert."
See Also: Alibaba Cloud’s Wang Jian Predicts Rapid AI Growth, Highlights Youth, Innovation As Key Drivers
Why It Matters: Despite sharing his broad spectrum of fears about AI, Vance did not push for regulations. When asked whether the U.S. government would be able to halt AI advancement if it spirals out of control, Vance responded with a rhetorical question: "If we take a pause, does the People's Republic of China not take a pause? And then we find ourselves all enslaved to P.R.C.-mediated A.I.?"
The GOP reconciliation bill, which recently passed the House and is now headed for the Senate, includes clause stating "no state or political subdivision may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems,” mirroring Vance's stance on not enforcing checks on AI advancement.
Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress that for the US to stay ahead of China in the A.I. race, “sensible regulation" that “does not slow us down” was the need of the hour. Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that America’s edge in A.I. would be lost unless it matches China’s speedy build-out of data-center power and factory-scale hardware.
Meanwhile, China announced a 60 billion yuan (US$8.2 billion) government-aided fund in April for jump-starting early-stage artificial intelligence projects, consolidating its ambition to dominate the global AI race.
Last week, Alibaba and DeepSeek's home province, Zhejiang, launched a wide-ranging policy package to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) research, industrial growth, and talent acquisition.
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