Socialists Are the New Luddites (And They May Have a Point)

Sen. Bernie Sanders released a video yesterday calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers. His pitch is that AI is being created and promoted by multi-billionaires, who are always the villains in his take on the world. He asks viewers this question: “Do you believe that these guys, these multi-billionaires are staying up nights worrying about what AI and robotics will do to the working families of our country and the world?” Sanders answers his own question, saying, “I think these very rich men want even more wealth and more power and for a whole bunch of reasons that is very dangerous.” Here’s the video:

I will be pushing for a moratorium on the construction of data centers that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop & deploy AI.

The moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up, and ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1%. pic.twitter.com/PoV5ziA4oQ

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 16, 2025

Regular readers know I’m not a fan of Bernie’s politics. In fact, I detest socialism with a passion and I generally shrug off complaints about the wealthy as the politics of envy.

In this case, I still don’t agree with Sanders but I think he does have a legitimate point. After all, the people he’s quoting in that video, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, aren’t know-nothing outsiders. It’s literally the people who know this field who are warning that it has the potential to replace a lot of workers. That’s not a worst case scenario in their view, it’s the desired outcome of AI reaching a point referred to as artificial general intelligence.

Elon Musk has talked about this many, many times. His view is that this will create a huge disruption and that, eventually work will become optional, replaced by some version of universal basic income. This clip of Musk talking about it with Joe Rogan is only a month old:

“There will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way,” Musk admits. He also says, in the full exchange that there are many ways this movie could end, meaning universal high income is just the most pleasant possible outcome, not the only one and certainly not a guaranteed one.

So in this instance, Bernie isn’t imagining things or cooking up scenarios that seem politically driven. He’s really just agreeing with some of the people who know this field best. AI really is coming for a lot of jobs and it’s going to happen a lot faster than anyone can imagine.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a discussion held at Georgetown University where Sanders spoke with Geoffrey Hinton is a British computer scientist who is sometimes referred to as the “Godfather of AI.” Hinton won the Nobel Prize in physics last year. Here’s a bit of what he had to say about the growth of AI.

So if you were to take people like me who really believe in this neural network approach to AI and you were to ask us 10 or 15 years ago, where we would be in 10 or 15 years? We would have said it is very unlikely we’ll have a system that can you can talk to in any natural language and it’ll answer any question you ask it at the level of not very good expert. We would have confidently predicted that that was 30 to 50 years out. It wasn’t going to happen in 10 years. Well, it has happened and I think that means that we can fairly confidently bet that whatever we have in 10 years, it’ll be not what we expected.

Hinton also walked through a whole scenario describing how AI needs certain things to carry out the orders given to it by humans. It needs to continue to exist and it needs control. In other words, it wants to live and it wants power. He also questioned whether anyone would really be able to turn it off.

Suppose there was someone who wanted to turn them off and suppose the AI could talk to that person. The AI by that point will be much more persuasive than a person. Already AI are about as persuasive as a person in an argument they’ll be much more persuasive than a person so they’ll be able to convince the person who’s going to turn them off not to do it that it would be a terrible terrible mistake to do that.

So, again, I don’t think Sanders is way off on a lark this time. He’s just listening to what the real experts in this field are saying. We are moving very fast and our speed is still accelerating such that we may be pretty far along before most people have caught on to what is happening. That’s basically the case he’s making for a moratorium. Let’s slow this down so we can think about it.

Yesterday I wrote about some fighting taking place in San Francisco over AI labs taking up space in one particular neighborhood of the city. The DSA supervisor for that neighborhood (another socialist like Bernie) wants to slow walk or even stop that from happening. She claims it’s to preserve jobs for lower income people but she seems to be an opponent of new tech more generally. She’s also against self-driving cars.

So I’m starting to see this pattern where socialists are sort of naturally becoming Luddites because they worry about the future of jobs and what happens if machines take over a lot of low-income jobs in a relatively short time. They want to slow this transition down. Do they have a point? Maybe so. This really could replace a lot of workers in the next decade.

But there’s a problem with his outlook which Sanders doesn’t mention. Letting democracy catch up to AI sounds good but there is at least one major non-democracy that is working as quickly as possible to make AI part of their system. China isn’t going to stop while we have a long conversation about how to approach this. They are moving forward quickly, taking the open source designs made in the US and copying and improving on them. 

Simply put, a moratorium for democracy just gives the autocrats a chance to race ahead. And what happens then could be much worse than the disruption Sanders is worried about. If you put the most powerful AI on the planet in the hands of a communist police state, it’s going to be used to strengthen that system and expand it.

So, on the one hand I have to give Sen. Sanders some credit for taking this issue seriously. Not many politicians seem to be aware where we are, on the cusp of a brave new world. But he loses a lot of points (with me at least) for not being equally clear-sighted about the danger beyond our borders. If we don’t build it, they will. If we refuse to weaponize it to protect our system, they will to protect theirs. 

It’s the same debate the world had about the nuclear arms race. No one thinks building weapons that can destroy the world is a great outcome, but not doing so could be even worse.

Update: Reactions to Bernie.

You could not have made the point any clearer

That it will be easier to build things in space and colonize new planets

Than unwind bureaucratic grift and regulatory capture https://t.co/SmbCrXff7N

— Andrew Côté (@Andercot) December 17, 2025

Elon responded to that.

The takers like Bernie will eventually follow the makers, but they’re cowards too and lack any sense of adventure, so they will wait until it is safe https://t.co/cGB4iZFq7f

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2025

Is Musk backing off his concerns about AI? I don’t think so. In generally he’s just a techno-optimist. He sees the potential for disaster and worries about these issues but he also has a lot of faith in our ability to overcome the problems we face, including the ones we create for ourselves.

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