r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 21d ago

Artificial Intelligence Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans - penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons
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u/deeptechdegen 21d ago edited 21d ago

It's not clear from the headline, but the article also mentioned "entities", thus corporations and their management are not exactly safe. It's not just the devs who will be targeted

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u/Beastw1ck 21d ago

We just need more of this in general. Put reckless irresponsible wealthy people in jail. We don't jail the rich in this country.

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u/DigNitty 21d ago

Honestly just accountability as a whole.

I’m so exhausted of seeing people do shit and then absolutely zero consequence happens.

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u/TK_Games 21d ago

I've just started writing a book about that. Thinking about running the premise as a D&D campaign because that's part of the book. Think it's gonna be my magnum opus

It's about four semi-functional 30somethings that play D&D together deciding to become an adventuring company in real life to stop the destruction of their community at the hands of a tech CEO and a corrupt mayor.

Goes from Harriet The Spy to Zero Dark Thirty over like, 600pages of dark comedy

I only mention it because you sound like my target audience, and me

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u/touristtam 21d ago

I think you might want to make sure one of them is actually a complete dick at heart that will throw his mates under the bus and create a multi billions corps that will actually ruin the community.

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u/TK_Games 21d ago

What? like Narnia?

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u/touristtam 20d ago

I guess so. I didn't think about Narnia at all when I wrote the comment. :)

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u/NonnagLava 21d ago

That... Actually sounds like many people may find it cathartic.

Not sure it's for me, but man do I hope you finish it and blow up over it.

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u/marr 21d ago

It was always like this, the difference today is everyone can see the shit being done.

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u/BerlinBorough2 21d ago

This is a unique case. This is rich people who might kill other rich people with their tech. Imagine an airport going offline due to AI entering the system and shutting it down for a few hours while some rich guy tried to land his private jet.

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u/froggz01 21d ago

The only time we jailed the rich is when the rich scam other rich people.

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u/regular_lamp 21d ago

That's the only place where you could plausibly enforce that.

How would you even define that at an individual "dev" level?

"This guy made a breakthrough in optimizing matrix multiplication that among other things enables better AI... ARREST HIM!"

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u/Mr_Venom 20d ago

You ask the robot from the future who he has "detailed files" on.

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u/Careless-Weather8877 21d ago

I know that when Israel started bombing Palestinian hackers they got real quiet. Well. Not all of them, Jake Williams (former NSA) and how mad he was that hackers are considered military targets. Which they should be.

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u/loves_grapefruit 21d ago

Pipe dream in America though.

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u/stargrazer10 20d ago

Tech is becoming so tough nowadays, you have some technicians looking to rather instead seed pipe and other trades

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u/OnceMoreAndAgain 21d ago edited 21d ago

There's an important aspect to this that I rarely see mentioned on reddit, which is the dangers of too much regulation when it comes to AI. I'm not saying Bernie's proposal is too much regulation (I have no idea on the details of it so I have no opinion on that), but rather this is a general argument for the other side that is important and doesn't get enough attention on reddit imo.

Don't get me wrong: I agree that regulating AI is going to be vital in both the short-term and long-term. I think everyone can agree with that. Using AI safely is crucial.

But there is such a thing as going overboard on regulation and I think there should be a fear of that. And why exactly should the average American citizen fear the USA's government over regulating AI? Because AI is absolutely going to be a massive part of the economy of humans going forward. Almost every company in the world will be using it heavily. Most office workers will be using it regularly. This is already happening in industries like software engineering, which are a massive sector of the world's economy.

That means every country wants to be the one to have the most successful AI services. Right now the big competition is between the USA and China with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet, Microsoft, and DeepSeek at the forefront. If the USA were to over regulate AI then Chinese companies like DeepSeek might get a huge advantage on the global market.

I know reddit is very anti-corporation and I understand the reasons why, but it matters to Americans if American companies do or don't win the global market on AI services. If you keep that revenue coming into American companies then you have the possibility to tax it. If that revenue is instead going to Chinese companies then Americans don't get the possibility of taxing it. Exporting a valuable service is really really good for an economy. The USA's economy benefited tremendously from tech services like Google, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, etc. AI is no different.

If you're a non-American though then I expect you'd be glad to see America over regulate AI as that opens up better opportunities for your own country to pull ahead or perhaps you just prefer the idea of Chinese companies winning this competition. Completely valid lines of thinking. The main point here is that the countries of the world compete with one another economically the headquarters of the winning companies matters to the citizens of a country. No one should want their country to be importing too many goods and services. The amount of regulation a country puts on its domestic countries affects the chances of those companies winning the global competition for good/product.

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u/loves_grapefruit 21d ago

You make a lot of big assumptions. It has yet to be shown that AI has made a meaningful impact in productivity, or at least one that justified the cost.

And China is only where it’s at because of where America is at, having learned from and built from the massive initial work that American companies have performed.

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u/OnceMoreAndAgain 21d ago

It has yet to be shown that AI has made a meaningful impact in productivity, or at least one that justified the cost.

I'm a software developer and 2 years ago my company purchased an enterprise license for Claude and Claude Code. I have seen the meaningful impact to productivity personally in my own job and at my entire company. The entire software industry these days is people sharing stories about how almost everyone is now using Claude and Codex, because it's just too good to not use in most circumstances.

The average redditor might still deny that AI is meaningfully impactful to productivity, but they're wrong. Maybe it's not currently impactful to every industry, but it's definitely already VERY meaningfully impactful to software engineering, which is a massive sector of the world's economy. If that were literally the ONLY industry affected, then that'd already be enough for AI to be massively important economically. The whole world runs on software and software is increasingly important.

It's no longer a matter of prediction about whether or not AI is the "real deal" or not. It's the real deal. It's already proven.

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u/Tiny-Cartographer676 21d ago

I'm not in software development, but I use ChatGPT/Claude for my job constantly. Comments on reddit outside of certain subs blow my fucking mind. It's not just people burying their heads in the sand, it's like we live in two different worlds, where they haven't touched AI since ChatGPT 3.5.

These people are gonna be in for a *rough* come to Jesus moment soon.

Granted, I'm half convinced a significant amount of these kinds of comments are propaganda from foreign countries who want to shape attitudes about AI in the US.

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u/OnceMoreAndAgain 21d ago

Yeah there's a fine line between healthy skepticism vs being a Luddite. I don't mind a skeptic but luddites are just annoying and foolish.

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u/JazzlikeSchedule2901 21d ago

Sure but targeting the devs is essentially like targeting the drug labs that make fentanyl. There are millions of devs who have the expertise to work on AI and super intelligence. There are maybe 2-3 dozen tech executives that are paying these developers to make these tools. Even mentioning targeting the devs is quite backwards. We know who is at the top of these companies and outside of compelling the devs to testify against these executives, we really dont need to be rounding up millions and throwing them in jail when the actual problem is the money.

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u/SzmFTW 21d ago

Hey, I’ve heard that corporations are people. Cool. Try them and sentence them like people.

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u/ghoonrhed 21d ago

Do you forget who's in charge of USA right now?

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u/FLG24 21d ago

Put them all behind bars- developers, CEO’s, anyone developing, using, contributing to this bs. Let us just have clean air and water.