Palantir CEO Alex Karp this week argued that his company’s breakthroughs in AI will help, not hurt, blue-collar workers. Of course, some workers could benefit from the application of AI. But, overall, no technological solution can fix what is fundamentally broken in the American economy, and technologies such as AI are far more likely to be abused by corporations looking to cut jobs through automation.

Karp has sold Palantir as a critical part of the effort to re-industrialise the American economy. It’s a savvy political appeal, as Donald Trump has made industrial reinvigoration a core part of his stated goals. It should also be noted that the President’s economic policies are failing to fulfil these goals. Manufacturing numbers in the latest jobs report looked bleak enough for Trump to fire the lead statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Will Palantir make the difference? Not likely. While AI will be a major part of any American economic strategy, it alone cannot bring back jobs lost to globalisation; nor will it be able to rebalance the economic scales in favour of workers.

It’s not the technology as such that is the problem: it’s the incentives. The American economy is driven by a unique disregard for any consideration other than short-term profit and shareholder maximisation. Even if AI could be employed in ways that would boost employment in manufacturing and infrastructure building, major multinationals will find much quicker paths to making money by using the technology to lay off office workers while they automate as much of their operations as possible. Amazon — a major employer of manual labour — has boasted of its use of AI to speed up automation at warehouses. Its most roboticised facility, a fulfilment centre that ordinarily would employ around 3,000 workers, now employs around a third as many.

The reality of AI’s impact on blue-collar jobs is that everything from warehousing to trucking and cab driving is now threatened by automation. Sure, some tradesmen will find their jobs secure and may even see wage increases as their skills become particularly valuable. But with warehouse work, logistics, and manufacturing downsizing their workforces, the overall result will be a sea of workers — mostly men — who won’t be able to find a job a robot can’t do more cheaply.

New breakthroughs in AI technology should benefit blue-collar workers, but for this to happen we need new laws that balance the gains made in efficiency and productivity with the social costs of joblessness. If AI is saving employers so much money in man-hours, and providing unheralded productivity gains, why do we maintain a 40-hour work week? Shouldn’t we cut the number of hours worked, with no loss of pay, to be roughly commensurate with the number of hours saved in automated labour?

To do that would require a political confrontation with America’s corporate elite, high finance, and Big Tech. After all, Palantir’s enormous financial success doesn’t lie in its promise to raise blue-collar wages but in its capacity to eliminate jobs. Thanks to Wall Street’s confidence, the firm now boasts five billionaire executives. That serves as a reminder that what’s really wrong in the American economy — from tax policy to financial regulations (and lack thereof) — is a system which channels wealth to the top, placing sustained downward pressure on growth. The rich, it turns out, are much happier to invest in labour-saving technology — while squirrelling away their savings in foreign banks — than they are to invest in American jobs.