Sanders introduces bill to ban artificial superintelligence and pause AI
sanders.senate.gov
sanders.senate.gov
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[1] Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2013
[2] Cancer Registries Amendment Act (1992)
Happens when one party holds most power in govt.
May not even reach the floor for a debate, let alone vote.
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/2095542398084415952 “We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario.
That is why today I am announcing new legislation to do just that.”
We've been down this road before with cryptography. No, it's not going to work.
So I predict the number of people we will tolerate being killed every year to have good AI will be more than zero, much more.
I think right now, given this is all very new, we can and should be looking at regulation as we start to identify what shoudl be the upper limit.
You can thank the Oil and Car lobby groups for Congress' silence on car issues.
As long as that sweet sweet blood money keeps flowing into the pockets of politicians, nothing will get better.
It doesn't seem to me like we have any guarantee that AI will contribute to public wellbeing. Right now, the public is socializing the losses while the industry privatizes the technology and cozies up to the federal government. LLMs will be usable for mass surveillance and war long before it ever leads us to a post-scarcity society.
If anyone can name a rational reason why the top comment is the top comment but this one deserves -4, please say so.
The difference is that today, unlike in the 20th century, there's a feasible path to post-scarcity. It's not "around the corner" but there's a path if you squint. Myabe it won't pan out, but it's worth a shot. The irony is that leftists want to ban AI to preserve scarcity thereby protecting people's jobs.
It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector.
To which those employees respond: What will happen to us?
And they are told: things will be great, you won’t need to work in the factories any longer, and we will have no shortage of goods.
Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”
This process will take generations. Over time, people will work less and less as productivity steadily increases (we already see this in the pre-AI era as technology has accumulated). Eventually, AI will do all necessary labor and goods/services will be incredibly cheap. Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.
Also, it's possible that this technology just doesn't pan out. There could be a bottleneck or a nuclear war or whatever. Maybe it just stops scaling, or it stays in the realm of text-generation and can't replace manual labor. But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
I think the crux is in how fast you think the technology is developing. The widespread view in Silicon Valley is that drop-in remote workers will be a reality within a couple years. Sam Altman is already claiming that AGI has been achieved [1]. Jack Clark from Anthropic puts a >50% chance on recursive self-improvement by the end of 2028 [2]. This is an enormous sector of labor being made redundant in a very short amount of time.
So the actions taken in this specific administration over these next few years become pivotal. The industry is unregulated and currently undergoing explosive growth in a way we haven't seen since the railroads, in entirely the wrong direction to Sanders' interests. He is a major player in the political process, so of course he will take measures to get things under control.
> But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
That's why the bill is about "temporarily pausing" development, not banning it forever.
This is to say nothing of the catastophic risks that the bill is actually mostly about, not just the labor disruptions.
[1]: https://venturebeat.com/technology/welcome-to-the-agi-era-op...
[2]: https://x.com/jackclarkSF/status/2051312759594471886?lang=en
That said, some displaced workers have experienced substantial difficulty moving to other industries, especially if those new jobs are in different cities or countries. And it is also possible that this time is different, although I'm not convinced.
Given how much control capitalists have over almost every mechanism for organizing, I don't even know if such labor movements would still be possible today.
If there's a way Trump can claim credit for it, he'll have no problem with it. He has no actual ideology beyond self-promotion and self-enrichment.
If it weren't for that, we already live in a post-scarcity world. But as such a state is anathema to the human condition, we continually strive to create new forms of scarcity that can separate the elite from the commons.
But if we solve food, hunger, housing, education, healthcare, and entertainment then that's enough for me. And no, it's not "the current political system" that prevents us from solving those problems now. Rather it's that engine of production is human labor, which forces us to rely on incentives.
In some sense I agree with you that starvation in the modern world is a political problem. Evidence for that is the common observation that famines don't occur in functioning liberal democracies.
But food production relies on more than technology. Human labor is necessary to produce food, and so incentives have to exist for people to do that work (prices, free markets, capitalism, inequality, etc). So if we decide "everyone deserves free food" then we are undermining the production of food. Why would people work in the fields when they could just collect their free food? Scarcity won't be truly gone until food is abundant whether or not there are any people working the fields.
Why should the owners undermine the value of their robots by providing free food for all? Those robots could be put to better use fighting wars instead.
The owners/workers at AI companies won't resist the redistribution. It will be seen as inevitable as AI performs a greater and greater share of labor. Also, the AI company owners/workers will accrue massive status and fame; which will become the new currency (like you noted in your first post).
I find this to be a somewhat incredible claim. I don't find it easy to believe such a thing. You can bring up enlightened self interest if you want, but you're going up against the entire history of humanity. I think it's more likely that something else will happen instead.
For example, you're underestimating the influence that being the ones to control all the labor in a society will grant these entities. When they reject your demands and send in the robot military to maintain order, how are you going to resist? Why should they bend when controlling all the labor will allow them to win?
2. They care about status, fame, reputation
3. Attitudes towards taxation/redistribution will change in a world where AI is doing almost all the labor
Yet even with fewer robots than necessary for certain victory, if enough households own a robot, the rich could easily force the government to stand down by taking a small percentage of the population hostage.
2. They don't care about reputation, or we wouldn't have examples like "doing funny arm gestures at an inauguration" or the openly corrupt dealings we're seeing these days. Above status and fame they primarily care about power, but enslaving everyone else would give them all 3 of those things. And let's not act like they're too rational to delude themselves into thinking they'd still be morally righteous - again, just look at so many recent examples.
3. Attitudes don't stop bullets.
Really, I'd love to be wrong on all this, and for the Epstein class to be better than what they show everyone. But our system makes the greediest among us rise to the top, and after so many blatantly cruel actions I can't believe anyone still gives them the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe there will also be world peace!
AI has achieved the same religious undertones as your average cult. Is the new god of the gaps for some tech people. The wild card to achieve anything.
Leftists oppose human suffering and disempowerment.
Labor is one thing, but there will always be some scarcity such as natural resources. I still doubt all labor could be done by AI alone at any point in the next couple generations.
Second of all, the massive redistribution shows no signs of appearing anytime soon. In the meantime the industry is in the midst of hysteria about a "permanent underclass" [1]. And this is all happening using models built off of the works of all writers, artists, and creatives everywhere, which said creatives have to then rent from the labs.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/ai-labor-work-for...
Whenever I hear AI (or a token predictor in its current form) will solve some universal problem like hunger etc., a picture comes to my mind. . It's a picture of a mom breaking bricks with a hammer to be used for molding concrete, with a child nearby playing, who is tied with a rope to a pole. It's not an imaginary picture, it's real, etched in my memory from childhood. It's a reality that's driven by scarcity- of food and security.
How will AI solve this to bring post scarcity society?
Banning automation is shortsighted and stupid; you refuse to let people increase the size of the pie because you're worried it'll make your fraction smaller. But a smaller fraction of a bigger pie is still a bigger piece.
> “Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control... That’s why I am introducing legislation to immediately pause the development of increasingly powerful AI and ban the creation of systems that humanity cannot fully control"
If AI turns evil, it will probably not discriminate on which countries to destroy. So Sanders kneecapping the USA won’t slow China, which could result in global destruction anyway.
Without global agreement ( and intrusive monitoring ), it doesn’t seem useful.
points gun from space
Always has been.
If Sanders were actually serious about trying to make the world a better place, he'd be more vocal about impeaching Trump and support Congress' efforts to do so. I get it, AI's an easy target.
(Don't get me wrong, I agree with the guy on many, many points. But attempting to ban development of something with so much money riding on it is laughably naive)