Sanders warns AI running the world not science-fiction, calls for slow down

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said the “science-fiction fear” of Artificial Intelligence (AI) running the world was not an outrageous concept during an interview on Sunday, as he argued there hasn’t been enough discussion about how America will deal with it.

“I did a symposium at Georgetown with Geoffrey Hinton, who is considered to be the godfather, Nobel Prize winner of AI. He thinks that AI is soon going to be smarter than human beings. So the science fiction fear of AI running the world is not quite so outrageous a concept as people may have thought it was,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.

During his appearance on Sunday, Sanders called AI the “most consequential technology in the history of humanity,” and said the people pushing for an AI revolution were the richest people in the world.

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“Who is pushing this revolution in technology? It is the richest people in the world. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Peter Thiel, multi, multi billionaires are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into implementing and developing this technology. What is their motive? Do you think they’re staying up nights worrying about working people and how this technology will impact those people? They are not. They are doing it to get richer and even more powerful,” he said.

Sanders said during the interview that the U.S. should consider a moratorium on developing more data centers for AI.

Major companies such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Amazon are among companies spending billions of dollars on new AI-focused data centers.

“I think we need to be thinking seriously about a moratorium on these data centers,” he said. “Frankly, I think you got to slow this process down. It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us, ‘It’s coming, you adapt.’ What are they talking about?”

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He wondered what major CEOs would do if people lost their jobs due to AI.

“What are they going to do when people have no jobs? What are they going to do, make housing free? So I think we need to take a deep breath, and I think we need to slow this thing down. One way to do it would probably be a moratorium on data centers,” he said.

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The progressive senator also said the country should aggressively study the impact of AI.

“Kids now among other things, kids can’t read books anymore. It’s too hard. Their attention span is too weak. So what we need to do is, I worry very much about kids spending their entire days getting emotional support. So we have got to take a hard look on that,” he said.

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If studies and research determine that AI is causing more isolation and mental health issues, Sanders said lawmakers needed to figure out how to stop it.