Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo has blamed one of President Donald Trump’s key policy initiatives for February’s abysmal job numbers.
The president has sought to promote and deregulate artificial intelligence, which he has called “one of the most important technological revolutions in the history of the world.
Those efforts may be backfiring, though, as the economy shed 92,000 jobs last month in a growing economic nightmare for the president. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4.4 percent as the economy lost jobs in three of the last five months.
The numbers were far worse than expected, leading Bartiromo to question whether AI was to blame.
“We’ve been talking about AI efficiencies and that has to be considered here,” she said Friday. “A week ago, we heard from Block, and they’re going to cut 40 percent of their workforce because they have AI tools that are replacing people. Oracle, the cloud unit, says it’s putting a pause on hiring.”
Trump has brought in tech billionaire David Sacks as his artificial intelligence and crypto czar to help the White House create a legal framework for cryptocurrency and AI, though Trump himself has not always demonstrated a firm grasp of the technology.
Last year, the president signed three executive orders aimed at deregulating AI and fired the former U.S. Copyright Chief after her office published a report that could have prevented AI companies from training their models on copyrighted material without the creator’s permission.
First Lady Melania Trump also hosted a White House Task Force on AI Education.
“I predict AI will represent the single largest growth category in our nation during the Trump Administration,” she said in a statement ahead of the event.
The technology has also proven to be a political headache for Trump, as his own supporters have balked at the idea of paying more for electricity as data centers threaten to drive up energy costs.
On Wednesday, Trump convened tech company executives to sign a pledge to build their own power plants to support their AI data centers.
The president, however, struggled to keep his eyes open as his scientific advisers spoke about electricity demand and consumer energy prices.
The post Fox Star Blames Policy Trump Championed for Jobs Bloodbath appeared first on The Daily Beast.
