Comedian Bill Burr didn’t hold back when discussing artificial intelligence during his recent Rolling Stone interview, targeting what he sees as a glaring hypocrisy in how AI is being deployed in the American workforce.
“I was talking all this AI is to replace working people,” Burr said, launching into his central critique. “It’s like, why don’t you make an AI CEO that’s empathetic, that cares about the middle class and the future of the planet?”
The logic according to Burr, is straightforward. “They’re making way more. You take that guy’s salary versus all the work. You’re going to save way more money replacing one guy. Why don’t you do that? Because it’s not for us, it’s for them.”
This wasn’t an isolated observation. Burr connected the AI conversation to issues he sees in corporate America, particularly the reaction to recent high-profile incidents.
“The response to the Luigi thing was not to be like, ‘Well, hey, maybe we need to look at what we’re doing if what we’re doing makes some crazy person do this.’ Their response was to take their faces off of the internet and get security.”
He continued: “It’s like you don’t think you need to examine? It’s like you’re not the president, you’re just the CEO of a business. Why do you need this level of security? What is it that you’re doing?”
The comedian sees AI as part of a larger pattern of corporate consolidation and worker displacement.
“This is not a battle of left and right. This is the working man versus this new era of Robber barons,” he told the audience at a recent casino performance. “We got to stop these nerds with apps. They keep messing over the working man.”
Burr’s perspective comes from someone who travels extensively for his comedy tours. “Dude, I travel everywhere. 85% of people are cool. They want to find love. They want to be able to get a sandwich and put a roof over their kid.”
For Burr, the fundamental issue is one of priorities. “If you work for a living and you’re not messing people over, you are all right with me. And there’s a level that you go to in business where I can’t say that with confidence beyond a certain point.”
When asked how things might change, Burr was frank about the difficulty. “It’s kind of out of the box. I don’t know. It would have to be, have to be a bloodbath. They’re not going to just give up.”
Throughout the interview, Burr returned repeatedly to the theme of working-class solidarity across political lines. “If somebody tells their version of the truth of what’s going on, and especially if it is true, it’s like they’re trying to escape Russia in the ’80s. It’s insane.”
