Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) suggested Sunday that AI is the “most consequential technology in the history of humanity,” as he reiterated his call for a moratorium on data center construction.
“It will transform our country. It will transform the world,” Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And we have not had in Congress, in the media — and I’m glad you’re doing this show — or among the American people the kind of discussion that we need.”
The senator argued the U.S. needs to be “thinking seriously” about restrictions on the development of data centers, which companies have been rapidly building to support the massive computing power needed to continue developing AI models.
“Frankly, I think you have got to slow this process down,” he added. “It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us, ‘It’s coming, you adapt.’”
“What are they talking about?” he continued. “They’re going to guarantee health care to all people? 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.”
Sanders began calling for a data center moratorium earlier this month, arguing that such a move is necessary to “give democracy a chance to catch up” amid the rapid push to develop AI.
He has pointed to the involvement of the world’s wealthiest people, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, in the technology’s development and suggested they are not focused on how it will impact working people.
“Is technology bad?” Sanders told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “Of course it’s not. There are good aspects, bad aspects. The function of technology must be to improve life for human beings, not make Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos even richer than they are.”
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