A.G. Gancarski
Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to voice displeasure with artificial intelligence, saying the technology will spawn “major, major issues for our law enforcement.”
“I’m not one who thinks that we should just turn over our society to a handful of big tech companies. I think there needs to be guardrails. I think there needs to be some rules of the road,” DeSantis said Tuesday at the 2025 Florida Sheriffs Association Summer Conference in Orlando.
What that roadmap may look like is still a mystery, though, even as DeSantis says his team is “thinking very deeply about it.”
“I think there’s going to be a lot of things that come down the pike, but don’t have any illusions. People are going to use AI to scam, to cheat, to steal, to harm people. And I think we’re going to have to come to grips. I mean we’re going to be working on a policy for Florida, and it may require some legislation to be able to provide adequate protections for folks,” DeSantis said.
As he has before, the Governor spoke to “upheavals” in employment, with “low-level … white collar” jobs in danger.
“I mean, you have folks that graduate college, they go in for more entry-level stuff, maybe it’s more kind of grunt work. AI is replacing some of those jobs. So what’s that going to do to the job market? And interestingly, we were told for so many years, well, you’ve got to learn to code, for some of these jobs, it may end up being the opposite,” DeSantis said of “the jobs that are going to be on the chopping block first.”
Ironically, DeSantis just vetoed legislation that would have required a report on how AI and automation are affecting the Florida workforce, on the grounds that “such a report, to the extent it has value, would likely be obsolete by the time it was published” later this year.
DeSantis also suggested that AI could erode the “human experience” itself.
“So, how are you able to make sure that technology in our society enhances the human experience, but doesn’t supplant the human experience. There’s an old saying, I think, therefore I am. It’s like kind of like the core of humanity is to be able to ability to think for yourself. And what AI is proposing is to relieve us humans of the ability to even do that. Kids growing up, are they going to even have to write a paper, or can they just plug something in the AI? What are you going to do? Any time you need something, do you actually read for yourself, or do you just jump it in? So it’s going to create a lot of huge implications for our society,” he predicted.
