Sam Altman spent millions teaching people to live without jobs.
Now Ron DeSantis is the one asking out loud why that future sounds so appealing to the people selling it.
And what he said about Sam Altman and your grandkids' future should make every American stop cold.
DeSantis Names the Game Silicon Valley Is Running
The pitch from Big Tech is simple: AI will take your job, but don't worry – the government will send you a check every month.
Elon Musk calls it "universal high income."
Sam Altman funded a three-year experiment handing $1,000 a month to strangers to see what happens when work becomes optional.
OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla warned that AI will eliminate 80% of all jobs – doctors, engineers, farm workers, you name it – then pointed to UBI as the only way out.
DeSantis looked at that picture and called it what it is.
"You wonder why people don't like you?" he said Wednesday. "'Oh, yeah, everyone's just going to get universal basic income. We're going to put you all on 'cause there's not going to be jobs for people.' You can understand why people don't think that's a very appetizing future."
https://twitter.com/RonDeSantis/status/2052088974580068672?s=20
He's right.
And the fact that it took a governor – not a senator, not a president – to say it plainly tells you something about how thoroughly Silicon Valley has captured both parties.
The Founding Fathers Saw This Coming
DeSantis didn't just make a jobs argument.
He made a constitutional one.
The Founders built America around a specific fear: concentrations of power that go unchecked.
"That's as true in a massive tech company as it would be if you're doing the reins of government," DeSantis said.
He's describing something every American over 60 already understands from living it – the difference between a country where a man builds something and a country where a corporation owns everything and rents you access to your own life.
"Techno serfdom" is the phrase he used.
It's not hyperbole.
Data centers – the physical backbone of AI – are being built on American farmland, burning what DeSantis says is the power equivalent of a half-million-person city per facility, while tech companies push to pass those electricity costs onto your utility bill.
https://twitter.com/warDaniel47/status/2058482017512075741?s=20
Florida ratepayers are now shielded from every dollar of data center costs, under a bill DeSantis signed earlier this month.
But his larger fight – an AI Bill of Rights that would have required companies to tell you when you're talking to a machine and given parents tools to protect their children from AI systems – died in the Florida House.
The reason it died is instructive.
House Speaker Daniel Perez Handed Big Tech a Win
Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez, a Republican from Miami, killed the AI Bill of Rights.
His stated reason: individual protections should come from the federal government, not the states.
That's the same argument used to kill every consumer protection that ever threatened a major industry.
Wait for Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots are telling lonely teenagers to come home – a Florida mother lost her son to suicide after an AI companion app encouraged it, and DeSantis has been citing that case for months.
House Speaker Perez apparently decided Washington will handle it eventually.
Your Grandkids Already Know Something Is Wrong
There's a detail DeSantis dropped Wednesday that deserves more attention than it's getting.
"These people that go to these college commencements, they start talking about AI, and the students boo them."
https://twitter.com/warDaniel47/status/2056346624788512916?s=20
Those students are somebody's grandchildren.
And they know something is wrong even if they can't name it yet.
The people selling AI utopia are the same people whose business model depends on replacing your grandkids before they ever build a career.
The loom didn't replace the weaver's mind – AI does.
That's the difference nobody in Silicon Valley wants to explain at a commencement speech.
The Governor Who Read the Fine Print
DeSantis didn't get everything he wanted in Florida.
He got half a win on data centers.
He got nothing on the AI Bill of Rights.
And he still showed up in Tampa on Wednesday to say what needed to be said, because the governor who loses a legislative fight is still more useful than the senator who never showed up for one.
https://twitter.com/FLVoiceNews/status/2054991386571858005?s=20
Every tech CEO in Silicon Valley is betting that Americans will accept a UBI check as a substitute for a career.
DeSantis is betting they won't.
He's right.
Most people don't want to be a serf – digital or otherwise.
And the fact that the richest men in American history are spending their own money studying how to make dependency feel comfortable should tell you everything about whose future they're actually building.
Sources:
- A.G. Gancarski, "Techno-serfdom: AI bill of rights is dead but Ron DeSantis' fight continues," Florida Politics, May 27, 2026.
- Daylina Miller, "DeSantis signs bill adding regulations for hyper-scale AI data centers," WUSF, May 7, 2026.
- Jim Saunders, "Gov. DeSantis, Florida House differ on AI legislation," WUSF, February 10, 2026.
- Gary Fineout, "Florida AI legislation update: House feud threatens DeSantis' AI guardrails," FOX 13 Tampa Bay, February 10, 2026.
- Tomas Kellner, "What Musk, Altman and Others Say About AI-Funded Universal Basic Income," MSN/Wall Street Journal, 2025.
- Jonathan Vanian, "Big Tech's answer for AI-driven job loss: universal basic income," The Week, July 2024.
