If AI is like the Internet, it won’t cost jobs

Debunking the AI jobs loss myth, islands of urban Trumpism, work-from-home babies and the cure for too much screen time

No. 391 | February 13, 2026

🤖 If AI is like the Internet, it won’t cost jobs

My early career built on being the first in Republican politics to ride the wave of digital transformation. And “first” is hardly an exaggeration. In the late 1990s, I built political websites and a proto-blog completely for fun and love of the game. This eventually got noticed and led to early jobs at the RNC and the George W. Bush campaign in 2004, where I started out as one of just two staffers running email and the website. Back then, the number of people in the GOP with this mix of skills could be counted by finger on one hand. I didn’t feel any real competition in the field until the late aughts — more than a decade after I coded my first website in 1995. A few years later, employment in the digital field skyrocketed — with hundreds of staffers on presidential campaigns doing the work of a handful of us in 2004.

The current moment with AI feels like the takeoff moment the Internet had in the late 1990s an…