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Bernie Sanders Wants to Tax Your Robot Replacement (And Apple's Buying the Future, One Startup at a Time)

Listen, I need you to sit with something for a second: Bernie Sanders just used ChatGPT to figure out which of your friends is getting replaced by AI first. And according to the algorithm, if you work at McDonald's, answer customer service calls, or code for a living—yeah, you're probably fucked.

The Vermont senator's latest report drops a genuinely wild number: 97 million American jobs could be automated within the next decade. Not "might be affected by." Not "could see some disruption." Eliminated. Gone. Replaced by algorithms that don't take lunch breaks or complain about healthcare.

His solution? Tax the robots.

But here's the kicker—while Sanders is proposing to tax companies that replace humans with machines, Apple just quietly bought a computer vision startup that will help your iPhone recognize your face to... well, eventually replace a bunch of security camera monitoring jobs. The irony is so thick you could automate it.

What ChatGPT Thinks About Your Job Security (Spoiler: It's Not Great)

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee did something unprecedented: they fed 15,638 specific job tasks across 774 occupations into GPT-4.1 and essentially asked, "Hey, could you do this?"

The AI was disturbingly honest. Here's what it said:

• 89% of fast food workers (3.3 million people): Automatable

• 83% of customer service reps (2.5 million people): Automatable

• 64% of accountants (992,000 people): Mostly automatable

• 54% of software developers (920,000 people): Wait, what?

• 47% of truck drivers (1 million people): Self-driving says hello

That software developer stat should make you pause. We're not just talking about replacing "unskilled labor" anymore—a phrase that was always bullshit anyway. We're talking about automating the people who build the automation.

The methodology here is actually fascinating. They weighted "core tasks" twice as heavily as supplemental ones, then scored each task on whether it could be fully automated, partially automated, needs human oversight, or remains unautomatable. It's like they built a doom calculator, and then pressed Enter.

The Robot Tax: It's Exactly What It Sounds Like

Sanders' proposal is straightforward: if you're a massive corporation that replaces humans with AI, you pay a tax. That revenue funds retraining programs and social safety nets for displaced workers.

The concept isn't as radical as it sounds. Bill Gates proposed this back in 2017, arguing that if a human worker generating $50,000 in value gets taxed, a robot doing the same work should be taxed similarly. Mark Cuban's on board. Elizabeth Warren wants to take a look. Even Republican Josh Hawley is open to the conversation.

But the robot tax is actually the smallest part of Sanders' proposal. The real swing-for-the-fences stuff includes:

Worker Empowerment:

• 32-hour workweek with no pay cuts (because if robots are doing the work, why the hell are we still grinding 40+ hours?)

• Workers get 45% of corporate board seats

• Companies must distribute 20% of stock to employees

• $17 federal minimum wage

• Kill "right-to-work" laws (which, let's be honest, have always been about killing unions)

Corporate Accountability:

• Ban stock buybacks (those financial engineering tricks that boost executive compensation while workers get nothing)

• Restore defined benefit pensions

• Paid family and medical leave

• End tax incentives that reward automation over human employment

It's basically a complete reimagining of the American labor compact. Whether you think it's necessary medicine or economic poison probably depends on whether you're more worried about displaced workers or quarterly earnings reports.

Here's What's Already Happening (While We Debate What to Do About It)

The thing is, we're not talking about some hypothetical future. This is happening right now, and the companies doing it are printing money:

Amazon: Cut 27,000 jobs since 2022. Annual profits? $59.2 billion. Executives are openly stating AI will "reduce our total corporate workforce."

UnitedHealth Group: Offering buyouts to 30,000 employees while bragging that "AI will direct over half of our calls" in 2025. Because nothing says quality healthcare like routing Grandma's cancer questions through an algorithm.

JPMorgan Chase: Planning to cut 10% of operations staff over five years. Profits last year? $58.5 billion. Must be really tight.

Walmart: Eliminated 70,000 jobs over five years while increasing revenue by $150 billion. The math is mathing, just not in a way that helps the people who stock the shelves.

This is the pattern: record profits, mass layoffs, AI implementation. Rinse, repeat, tell shareholders you're "optimizing operations."

The Productivity Scam We All Fell For

Let's zoom out for a second, because there's a bigger story here that explains why people are so pissed off.

Since 1973, worker productivity in America has increased by 150%. You'd think that means workers are getting paid 150% more, right? That's how it's supposed to work in the economics textbooks—more productive workers create more value, capture more wages.

Except real wages have declined by about $30 per week over that same period. Meanwhile, corporate profits surged 370%.

We got more productive. We created more value. And we got less of it.

MIT research shows that 50-70% of wage structure changes over the past four decades came from automation in routine-task industries. The machines made us more productive, the companies kept the gains, and we got... well, we got to compete with the machines for what's left.

The robot tax isn't really about taxing robots. It's about asking: who benefits from technological progress? Because right now, the answer is "people who already own stuff."

Meanwhile, Apple Bought Your Future Security Camera (And the Team That Built It)

While Sanders is proposing systemic policy overhauls, Apple just closed a deal that perfectly illustrates how Big Tech is positioning itself for the AI future: they acquired Prompt AI, a computer vision startup you've never heard of, in what's called an "acquihire."

Here's how it went down: On October 10, 2025, Prompt AI's 11-person team got called into an all-hands meeting. Leadership announced Apple was buying them out. Some employees are joining Apple. Others got reduced compensation packages. The original investors? They're getting screwed—"won't be made whole" is the polite way of saying they lost money.

And here's the twist: Apple outbid Elon Musk's xAI and Neuralink for this deal.

What Prompt AI Actually Did (And Why Apple Wants It)

Prompt AI built Seemour, an app that made your dumb security cameras smart. It could:

• Recognize specific people and objects

• Send real-time alerts with text descriptions of what's happening

• Answer natural language queries like "Did the dog get fed today?"

• Identify pets, visitors, and delivery people

• Work with Ring and Arlo cameras

The technology is legitimately cool. The startup raised $5 million in seed funding but couldn't figure out a sustainable business model. Classic story: great tech, no path to profitability, gets absorbed by a giant that has both the money and distribution to make it work.

Apple's expected to integrate this into HomeKit and use it for their rumored home security cameras launching in 2026. Facial recognition, infrared sensors, battery life measured in months instead of weeks. It'll compete with Amazon Ring and Google Nest, except with Apple's privacy-first marketing angle.

The irony? This technology will eventually help automate security monitoring jobs. The same pattern, different industry.

The Acquihire Gold Rush: Why Everyone's Doing This

The Prompt AI deal is part of a massive trend. In the first half of 2025 alone:

• 365 AI M&A deals totaling over $10 billion

• 67% year-over-year growth in AI/ML professionals on LinkedIn (meaning everyone's fighting for the same talent pool)

• Over 50% of IT leaders report critical AI talent shortages

Google paid $2.4 billion for Windsurf. Microsoft dropped $650 million on Inflection. These aren't traditional acquisitions—they're talent grabs disguised as company purchases.

Why acquihires instead of just hiring?

Speed: Getting a coordinated team that already works together beats hiring individual engineers over months

Regulatory arbitrage: Buying a tiny startup doesn't trigger antitrust scrutiny the way buying a competitor does

IP and expertise: You get both the people and whatever they've already built

Cost efficiency: Weirdly, paying $5-10 million for a team of 10 elite engineers is cheaper than competing for them in the open market

It's talent poaching with extra steps and better PR.

Apple's AI Problem (And Why They're Playing Catch-Up)

Here's what makes the Prompt AI acquisition particularly interesting: Apple is behind in AI, and everyone knows it.

Tim Cook admitted in July 2025 that Apple is "open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap"—CEO-speak for "we're late to this party and need to buy our way in." They've already acquired seven companies this year.

The problem is Apple's historical approach—small, targeted acquisitions focused on privacy and on-device processing—doesn't match the current AI arms race where Google and Microsoft are spending billions on data centers and foundation models.

Meanwhile, key AI engineers are leaving Apple for Meta and other competitors. Analysts are warning that an incomplete AI strategy threatens their core business. The pressure is building.

The Prompt AI deal represents Apple's strategy: lots of small acquisitions of specialized teams, integrated carefully into existing products, maintaining their privacy-focused brand. It's the tortoise approach in an industry full of hares.

Whether that works or leaves them eating dust remains to be seen.

Let's Break Down What This All Means

We've got two stories here that seem unrelated but are actually the same story told from different angles.

Sanders' angle: AI is coming for millions of jobs, corporations will capture the gains, and we need systemic policy intervention—taxes, worker ownership, reduced hours—to make sure technological progress benefits everyone, not just shareholders.

Apple's angle: AI is coming, talent is scarce, and the companies that acquire the right teams and technology fastest will dominate the next decade of computing. Regulation is something to navigate around, not wait for.

These aren't compatible visions. One requires collective action and redistribution. The other assumes winner-take-all competition and concentration of resources.

The uncomfortable truth is both are probably right.

AI will displace millions of jobs. That's not fearmongering; it's companies telling us their plans in earnings calls. And the companies best positioned to benefit from AI will aggressively acquire talent and technology to maintain their advantages. That's how capitalism works.

The question isn't whether this happens. It's what we do about it.

The Timing Problem Nobody's Talking About

Here's what keeps me up at night: the gap between when disruption happens and when policy responds.

Sanders can propose a robot tax today. It won't pass today. Even if Democrats controlled Congress, the policy debate would take years. Implementation? Years more. By the time anything actually happens, we'll be well into the "97 million jobs displaced" timeline.

Meanwhile, Apple's Prompt AI deal closed in days. Corporate automation decisions happen at the speed of quarterly earnings calls. The Trump administration's "AI Action Plan" calls for cutting federal funding to states that implement "burdensome" AI regulations, which is a fancy way of saying "don't you dare slow this down."

Policy operates on electoral cycles. Technology operates on Moore's Law. That gap is where the damage happens.

So What the Hell Do We Do?

I don't have a perfect answer, but here's what seems clear:

We need the robot tax debate, even if the specific policy is flawed. Because we need to establish the principle that technological progress should benefit the people it displaces, not just the people who own the technology.

We need to talk about working hours. The 40-hour workweek was established when productivity looked completely different. If automation makes us radically more productive, why are we working the same hours—or more? The 32-hour workweek isn't radical; it's math.

We need to get real about retraining. "Learn to code" became a meme because it was insulting in its simplicity, but the underlying problem—how do you retrain a 45-year-old truck driver whose job is being automated?—is incredibly real and we have no good answers.

We need to acknowledge that speed matters. Waiting for perfect policy means watching people lose livelihoods in real-time. Sometimes "good enough now" beats "perfect eventually."

We probably need to tax something. Whether it's robots, corporate profits, wealth, or carbon emissions, the math doesn't work otherwise. You can't have massive productivity gains flow entirely to capital and expect a functional society on the other side.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The Sanders report used AI to figure out which jobs AI would take. Apple bought a company building AI to automate security monitoring. Both are responding to the same reality from opposite directions—one trying to protect workers, one trying to capture markets.

Neither is wrong, exactly. Both are responding rationally to the incentives in front of them.

But here's the thing about automation: it's not like previous technological disruptions. When agriculture mechanized, people moved to factories. When factories automated, people moved to services. Where do you move when AI can do cognitive work as well as physical labor?

The robot tax debate isn't really about taxes. It's about whether we believe technological progress should make everyone's life better, or whether we're comfortable with it making a few people extraordinarily wealthy while everyone else fights for scraps.

Choose your future carefully. Because we're building it right now, one acquisition and one displaced worker at a time.

Links and Loose Ends

The fact that Bernie Sanders' report used ChatGPT to analyze job displacement is either brilliant methodology or dystopian irony. Possibly both.

Apple's strategy of small acquihires versus Google/Microsoft's billion-dollar bets is fascinating. It's like watching someone bring a knife to a gunfight while insisting their knife is really good and respects your privacy.

Real talk: if your job involves routine tasks that can be described clearly enough for a computer to understand, start thinking about Plan B. Not next year. Now.

The investor loss on the Prompt AI deal is getting overlooked, but it matters. If acquihires become the standard exit, early-stage AI funding gets way less attractive. That has downstream effects on innovation we won't see for years.

Someone should probably ask: if ChatGPT can accurately predict which jobs are automatable, can it predict which policies would successfully protect workers? Or would it just tell us what we already know and refuse to do?

The 32-hour workweek sounds radical until you remember France has had a 35-hour workweek since 2000 and their economy didn't collapse. Maybe the radical thing is working ourselves to death while machines do more of the work.

Final thought: we built a system where "record profits and mass layoffs" can be uttered in the same earnings call without anyone batting an eye. Maybe that's the thing we actually need to tax.