The 84-year-old senator is one of the few federal lawmakers taking up the cause of the AI skeptics — or “doomers,” as some have labeled the group — who have voiced concerns about AI’s “existential risk to humanity.”
While both Democrats and Republicans alike have embraced the idea that the U.S. is locked in a fierce competition with China, Sanders is arguing the technology’s risks require the opposite approach.
“We’re building a runaway train here,” Sanders told reporters on a call last week. “It’s moving down the track at rapidly expanding acceleration, and we don’t know where it ends up. We don’t know what its impact will be.”
“Do I think Congress is prepared to deal with it? I do not,” he added. “So I’m going to do everything I can to try to generate support for action, bring people together and come up with some rational solutions.”
Sanders began ramping up his messaging on AI late last year, when he first called for a moratorium on data center construction as a means of giving “democracy a chance to catch up” amid the “unregulated sprint” to develop the technology.
He and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation in March that would bar construction of all new data centers until “strong national safeguards are in place,” such as measures preventing mass job displacement and limiting increases in consumer electricity prices.
This comes as data centers have increasingly encountered local pushback and Americans have become more wary about AI.
... “These technologies right now are of growing concern to the American people,” Sanders said on the press call, adding, “It’s not because the American people are Luddites. They see positive aspects of AI and robotics.”
“They worry very much that the people who are investing in this technology … the very richest people on Earth, really do not stay up nights worrying about working families, but simply want to get wealthier and more powerful, which is my view as well,” he continued.
His position on AI, particularly the call for a slowdown, stands in sharp contrast to much of the rest of Washington, which has been chiefly focused on ensuring that the U.S. remains ahead of China on the technology.
....While Democrats have largely opposed the preemption push and called for more guardrails on the technology, few have supported the idea of pumping the brakes on AI.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) dismissed the moratorium approach as “idiocy” at an Axios event in late March, warning this “simply means China’s going to move quicker” and arguing “this is one where we can’t lose.”
....Outside of the nation’s capital, Sanders enjoys more support among a contingent of researchers who have long warned of the risks from AI, particularly superintelligence, a form of the technology that surpasses human intelligence.
“If we just go ahead and do something that’s foolhardy before figuring out how to control this stuff, we’re in a worse position than the neanderthals,” said Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
..... Sanders suggested that the AI race bears a resemblance to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War era, pointing to talks between then-President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear disarmament in the 1980s as instructive.
“One might think that, given the very real threat to humanity, countries might come together to regulate this technology through an international treaty, like we did with nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War,” Sanders said.
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