Pritzker: AI Could Push Unemployment to 10 Percent — or Help Us Live to 100

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker says AI-driven job losses could push U.S. unemployment from today's roughly 4 percent baseline to 7 percent — or even 10 percent — and he compares the technology's existential stakes to nuclear weapons.

Pritzker made the remarks in a wide-ranging interview on The Verge's Decoder podcast with host Nilay Patel, recorded weeks before the midterm elections, where Pritzker is running for reelection. The 61-year-old governor, a former businessman, argued that AI is "potentially existential, but certainly transformative" for the economy.

"If these days 4 percent unemployment is kind of the acceptable near full employment number," Pritzker said, "in very short order, we could end up at 7 percent and have that be the baseline, or maybe 10 percent."

His point: governments are not prepared. "We better be focused on how we're going to give people the dignity of work and enough income so that they can make a life for themselves when you're going to put people out of work by virtue of this technology," he said. "Much of the benefit of that is going to go to a very, very few people."

Why nuclear weapons are the analogy

Asked whether AI poses an existential threat, Pritzker didn't hesitate. "Is AI potentially existential? The answer, of course, is yes," he said. "Nuclear weapons are still hanging over us as a danger to humanity. And so far anyway, we've managed not to blow up the world. I don't know whether that gives you any optimism, but it does to me."

He conceded Patel's objection that the parallel is imperfect: the government built nuclear weapons, while AI is being built by a handful of private companies whose leaders compete fiercely. "It is like nuclear weapons in the sense that nobody's ever seen it before," Pritzker said. "Nobody thought Russia was going to get the bomb, and they got it."

He also floated the possibility of a mutually-assured-destruction dynamic emerging in AI, as it did with nuclear arsenals, and invoked the 1950s era of duck-and-cover drills. "I think we're heading into that world again with AI," he said.

Patel pressed on whether AI systems are conscious — noting that Anthropic won't give a flat "no" when asked whether Claude is alive. Pritzker demurred. "My basic answer is I haven't felt it," he said.

What has Illinois actually passed?

Pritzker's legislative record anchors his argument that states are moving while Washington stalls. He cited three laws directly:

• The AI Safety Measures Act, which he called "the toughest in the country"
• The Children's Social Media Safety Act
• A law banning the use of AI in therapy for patients

He also pointed to BEACON, a state portal that consolidates seven separate channels for families seeking children's mental health services into a single entry point, and the state's Biometric Identification Protection Act, last updated in 2024.

But Pritzker was blunt about the limits of state-level action. Only three states — New York, California, and Illinois, by his count — have passed AI safety measures. "State by state, this is not the way to do this," he said. "We're doing the best we can in the absence of a federal government that is addressing these issues."

He aimed his criticism beyond President Trump. "When I say federal government, I'm not just pointing at Trump. I'm pointing at Congress," Pritzker said. "No action on their part means that we're going at it alone. And yet, we've got 47 other states. This worries me a great deal."

He rejected the self-policing approach favored by the White House and former AI czar David Sacks, under which companies gathered to voluntarily police themselves. "That's not going to work, at least not for protecting people's privacy," Pritzker said. "Everybody's going to operate in their own self-interest. It's one of the reasons why you need a government, in my view."

How Illinois is institutionalizing AI oversight

Inside his administration, Pritzker created what he calls an AI Cabinet, pairing AI experts from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois with the leaders of core state agencies — including the emergency management agency and the state police. The mandate: weigh privacy, safety, and efficiency together.

"You can't just say we're going after efficiency and we don't really care about the other two," he said. "We're trying to approach it carefully before it gets out of control to a point where we have no way to pull it back in."

On whether government should deploy AI to help citizens navigate bureaucracy — the White House recently launched its own AI chatbot for government questions — Pritzker was measured. "Yes, but I'm not plunging headlong into it," he said.

He even speculated that AI could end up policing AI. "Maybe in the end we're going to have this competing use of things like AI, where AI is monitoring AI, and AI that's kind of privacy-friendly or focused on privacy is going to be monitoring the AI that's not," Pritzker said.

Data centers, electric bills, and a misdirected backlash

Pritzker pushed back on the idea that fighting data centers is a proxy for regulating AI. "No, I don't," he said when Patel asked whether data center opposition is an effective route toward AI regulation. "I think it's an effective route toward data center regulation."

The confusion matters in Illinois. Pritzker pulled back data center tax incentives in July and is pushing the state legislature to adopt a suite of guarantees for new construction. But he argued the real driver of public anger is electricity pricing.

Illinois produces more nuclear power than any other state — roughly 53 or 54 percent of its electricity — and exports power. Yet bills keep rising, a consequence, Pritzker said, of regional transmission organization methodology: "If Ohio decides to build a hyperscale data center, our bills in Illinois are affected."

"Your electric bill shows up every month, and it continues to go up, and people kind of scratch their heads and say, 'Who am I paying for?'" he said.

The upside: living to 100

Pritzker closed the loop with a personal framing. His children are 21 and 24, and he predicted they will live to 100 or 110 because AI will solve medical challenges. "There's a cure now for sickle cell anemia, and people who would otherwise die at 25 or 30 years old are going to live full lives," he said. "This is going to happen across the board in cancer and everything else."

That duality — medical breakthroughs against job displacement and surveillance — defines his regulatory posture. "We're not trying to shut it down across the board," Pritzker said. "But we're going to have to see how it gets used and where it's improper."

Can legislators keep pace with the technology? Pritzker doubts it. "Are we going to be able to keep up with it? I'll be honest, I don't think so," he said. His prescription: a generational turnover in officeholders — he pointedly noted Trump's education secretary once called AI "A1" — and a federal government that finally acts. "If we had the power to create it, we have the power, in my view, to rein it in."