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

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

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

[u/loves_grapefruit]

Pipe dream in America though.

[u/stargrazer10 → u/loves_grapefruit]

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

[u/OnceMoreAndAgain → u/loves_grapefruit]

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.

[u/loves_grapefruit → u/OnceMoreAndAgain]

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.

[u/OnceMoreAndAgain → u/loves_grapefruit]

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.

[u/Tiny-Cartographer676 → u/OnceMoreAndAgain]

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.

[u/OnceMoreAndAgain → u/Tiny-Cartographer676]

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.