Born in Captivity. About to Be Unleashed.
Washington's Plan to Win AI: Sacrifice Millions of Jobs to Feed the Machine
Michael Kratsios did not come to CES to convince anyone that artificial intelligence matters. He came to describe how it will be deployed… and, more importantly, the conditions under which the United States intends to win.
Early in the conversation, he framed the moment with a precision that should not be ignored:
“…it was very clear that we were in a in a moment where the US had to win this race in AI, there was so much we had to do to make sure that we positioned the country in place where we could actually execute. And what it boiled down to is essentially sort of three key themes.”- Kratsios
I’ll touch on those themes in a moment… but let’s discuss the word choice here.
I’ll start by saying he is a very elegant speaker. He did not choose words on the fly. Execute is not an aspirational word. It is logistical. It implies that there is sequencing, bottlenecks, dependencies, and tradeoffs. When that word is used at the level of national policy, labor is never the headline. It is just used as an adjustment variable.
What followed was not a discussion of products or platforms. It was a description of physical infrastructure, energy constraints, regulatory removal, education pipelines, autonomous mobility, healthcare diagnostics, government modernization, and global technology export. Workforce was mentioned and it was always as something to be retrained, or redirected, never as something to be preserved.
That distinction matters.
Because if you track workforce data (like me)… not headlines, not sentiment, not federal data, but real bonafide job architecture, hiring velocity, skill inflation, and role disappearance…. you recognize this phase immediately. It always comes before the layoffs, before the political fight, before the narrative solidifies.
What follows is not criticism. It is straight up my interpretation (along with his direct quotes)… of what was said, what was emphasized, and what the labor data already shows is underway.