This is deliberate from both the left and the right to keep costs down. "AI" is ambient and no one can pin the blame on anyone.

In my industry -- software engineering -- AI is being blamed for a job market that tumbled a year before GPT even entered the mainstream. There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame AI because it doesnt force us to really examine the causes and thus no policy changes would result.

In SWE-land, we done hire people because of three reasons

1. better open source means you dont need to build it on your own

2. More h1/h4/opt visa workers means you can have loyal and under-market pay workers without attrition risk (even Trump with all his power couldnt tackle this lobby)

3. offshore -- us healthcare and benefits are too expensive, easier to just send the work to other countries