President Joe Biden warned on Wednesday that a new era of “robber barons” was on the verge of eroding Americans’ hard-won freedoms unless the government took steps to ensure that the ultra-wealthy pay a fair share of taxes and are not allowed to wield “outsized” power.
In remarks designed to echo President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, Biden stated that he was just as concerned as Eisenhower was about what he described as a “tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.”
This, combined with a dangerous “concentration of technology power and wealth,” he added, is creating a new “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
Americans are “buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power,” said Biden, who criticised the end of fact-checking efforts by top social media platforms for allowing the truth to be “smothered by lies told for power and profit.”
“We must hold the social platform accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power,” he continued, adding that the rise of artificial intelligence — “the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time” — requires safeguards to prevent it from “spawning new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation,” said the president.
“We must ensure that AI is safe, trustworthy, and beneficial to all humankind. In the age of artificial intelligence, it is more important than ever that the people govern, and as the land of liberty, America, not China, must lead the world in AI development,” he emphasised.
He urged Americans, including future presidents, legislators, jurists, journalists, and the general public, to “confront these powerful forces” by reforming the tax code, removing large sums of money from political campaigns, and establishing term limits for the nation’s highest court.
The president delivered his fifth speech from the Oval Office, this time from behind the iconic desk made of timbers salvaged from the H.M.S. Resolute and given to then-President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1880.
The most recent before his farewell remarks was an address he gave to explain his unprecedented decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race and hand over his party’s nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Biden’s stark warning of a tech-fueled oligarchy seizing unprecedented power and endangering America’s most deeply held values comes just days before Trump is set to take office after winning the 2024 election with the help of the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.
Other technology figures who were once seen as bulwarks against Trump, such as Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have donated large sums of money to the 47th president’s inauguration in the months following the 2024 election.
Zuckerberg, who was once regarded as a reliable donor to liberal causes, has recently taken a hard right stance, ordering the end of fact-checking efforts at his companies, as well as diversity initiatives, and even rules prohibiting hate speech on his platforms.
Biden urged Americans to take a stand against this emerging technology threat, just as they “stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts” during the last gilded age over a century ago.
“They did not punish the wealthy.” They simply made the wealthy follow the same rules as everyone else. Workers want the right to earn their fair share.
You know, they were dealt into the deal and helped put us on track to build the largest middle class and most prosperous century in the history of any nation. “We need to do that again,” he said.
“We must not be coerced into sacrificing the future of our children and grandchildren. We must continue to push forward and faster. “There’s no time to waste,” Biden said.
Biden concluded with his “eternal thanks” to Americans, assuring them that he still believes in “the idea for which this nation stands, a nation where the strengths of our institutions and people matter and must endure.”
He concluded with this: “Now, it’s your turn to stand guard — may you all be the keeper of the flame.”