Odd Lots · Bloomberg

Gina Raimondo on How European Industry Is Getting Crushed

April 6, 2026·46 min·4 clips

Raimondo argues that winning the AI race while producing mass unemployment is not winning — it is automating America's decline.

Okay, the AI headline sounds simple. America wants the best chips, the best models, and the biggest data centers, and the guest says the AI race still matters. Then the plumbing gets awkward. If automation creates AI unemployment without training, cushioning, or transition systems, she argues, the country has not really won. That part lands. The harder question is who builds the incentives, policies, training, and systems that keep a technical victory from turning into social breakdown. There is no tidy villain. The host points out the odd job facing companies such as Meta or Google: beat rivals, help America compete with China, and somehow manage the social consequences too. That is a heavy assignment. The answer does not let companies off the hook, but it also does not treat them as the whole problem. American strength in chip design and AI models is treated as real. It just is not the same thing as stability. The guest keeps circling one uncomfortable mechanism: a country can lead the race while its labor market and politics take the hit. The numbers are blunt. A 15 percent unemployment rate, civil unrest, and political violence are failure signs, not background noise around innovation. So the conversation gets narrower and more useful. Instead of treating AI as a pure contest of compute and capability, it asks what has to happen beside the data centers. The tone stays practical, even when the premise is huge. The sharpest part is the dry insistence that winning the model race and surviving the transition are two different jobs.

As heard by us

Industrial policy, minus the usual slogans.

This episode treats the AI race as unfinished if the transition is ignored. Its central point is plain: better models, chips, and data centers do not amount to success if they still leave AI unemployment without a system to manage what comes next.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the AI race framed as a jobs-and-stability problem, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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