US senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.
Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN’s State of the Union that he was “fearful of a lot” when it came to AI. And the senator called it “the most consequential technology in the history of humanity” that will “transform” the US and the world in ways that had not been fully discussed.
“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”
Days from being scheduled to help swear New York mayor-elect and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani into office, Sanders said “the richest people in the world” were pushing the technology. He singled out tech moguls Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel while questioning their motives.
“You think they’re staying up nights worrying about working people and how this technology will impact those people?” Sanders said. “They are not. They are doing it to get richer and even more powerful.”
Sanders also pointed to studies that show dependence on AI chatbots for emotional support. “If this trend continues, what does it mean over the years when people are not getting their support, their interaction from other human beings, but from a machine?” he said. “What does that mean to humanity?”
That theme was taken up separately on State of the Union by Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican senator and co-sponsor of legislation to protect minors from chatbots.
The proposed measure – the Guardianship Over Artificial Intelligence Relationships (Guard) Act – seeks to ban providing AI companions to minors. It also mandates that AI companions disclose their non-human status and lack of professional credentials. The measure seeks to establish criminal liability if companies make AI companions available to minors that solicit or produce sexually explicit content – or encourage self-harm or violence.
Britt said she had met with parents who have told her “devastating stories about their children where chatbots ultimately, when they kind of peeled everything back, had isolated them from their parents, had talked to them about suicide”.
She said: “If these AI companies can make the most brilliant machines in the world, they could do us all a service by putting up proper guardrails that did not allow for minors to utilize these things, that also told the user consistently that they are not a physician, they are not a psychiatrist, ‘I am a machine.’”
Britt said AI companies should be held criminally liable if they create spaces where chatbots “are having these types of sensual and sexual relationships with young people or encouraging suicide”.
The remarks by Sanders and Britt offer a rare convergence of thinking from the left and right on aspects of the issue of governing AI. Sanders said Congress needed “to vigorously study the impact that AI is having on the mental health of our country”.
“I worry very much about kids spending their entire days getting emotional support,” he added. “So we have got to take a hard look on that.” The senator said lawmakers need to be “thinking seriously” about a moratorium on new AI datacenters.
“Frankly, I think you have got to slow this process down,” he said. “It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us, it’s coming, you adapt. What are they talking about? They 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.”
