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
48.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

155

u/randobis 21d ago

I think Bernie’s heart is in the right place, but whoever is advising him on AI/tech is either completely unqualified to talk about it or is trying to sabotage him so he sounds like an old man yelling at the cloud.

Yes these tech oligarchs should not be given the keys to power and need to be put in line. But you can’t “stop” AI. If the US stops progressing, you’re just giving the keys to China.

46

u/kozz76 21d ago

This is just slopulism. The intention is not the solution to a problem but to draw attention to Bernie's personal brand.

94

u/BidoofSquad 21d ago

He’s just pandering to Redditors who hate AI. 99% of what he does is just redditor pandering that goes nowhere and he knows will go nowhere

38

u/[deleted] 21d ago edited 21d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/starm4nn 21d ago

The dangers of populism are present throughout history whether it be the last century of the Roman Republic leading to the Empire, the chaos of the French Revolution leading to the Napoleonic French Empire, or even the rise of 20th century autocrats in the aftermath of WW1 leading to the rise of communism and fascism.

Grandiose narratives which flatten

centuries of history into fitting into a simple narrative sounds like populism to me.

Really the phenomena you're describing is popular movements arising when institutions are already failing. In your WWI example, you have communism and fascism arising in response to monarchist and parliamentary systems that lead to 20 million people being sent to the meat grinder for nothing.

4

u/TopTippityTop 21d ago

Let's hope, because it's a very dumb proposal

3

u/Velkrum 21d ago

And soon hating AI is going to be akin to hating the internet. It's almost already ubiquitous in our daily lives and it's only going to grow. We are going to have to find pathways to living along side it.

And no, I have no idea how that's going to work. It's pretty terrifying. But it's real and we have to face it.

0

u/Etroarl55 21d ago

I WOULDNT say nowhere, it’s kept him relevant, if he was in Canada he would also be apart of the majority.

He doesn’t do this because he hopes to gain favour with people like you, but for people like you to still know his name and relevance. And to keep him still relevant enough to keep winning his seats.

-5

u/ohhi23021 21d ago

i don't think he's talking about THIS AI, this current AI is harmless and stupid, but as soon as general AI is discovered, your going to wish there was a responsible government to regulate it, it's going to 1000% take your jobs this time, every single one.

5

u/Deathpacito-01 21d ago

"THIS" AI that we have today is significantly more capable than the ChatGPT we knew back in 2024, or even 2025.

The newest generation of AI has repeatedly demonstrated capacity for genuine breakthroughs, e.g. solving the Erdos unit distance problem, the Jacobian conjecture, etc.

I'd rather we start proper AI regulation and oversight too early than too late.

2

u/BidoofSquad 21d ago

Sure but we need good regulations, not a nebulous ban on “superintelligence”. I like some of what Bernie does but at the end of the day he’s an attention seeking slopulist.

1

u/Deathpacito-01 21d ago

Oh yeah I agree, I don't think Bernie's suggestions here make much sense lol

3

u/cinderful 21d ago

China's gonna win because it's far too easy to distill the American frontier models thus exploiting their billions in expenditures and then China focuses on making them vastly more efficient also massively reducing their resource requirements. American companies can't stop them because they built it all on copyrighted material anyway.

American companies are building monster trucks and China is just ripping their tech and turning it into a bunch of tiny efficient EVs . . . oh also they're making the best EVs in the world now sooooo

9

u/TopTippityTop 21d ago

The heart is not in the right place. It will not stop open weights nor achieve international collaboration.

It will simply incapacitated the US while ensuring China becomes a permanent world ruler with super intelligent AI that has not gotten much alignment work.

That is a bad scenario. All the downside, no upside.

1

u/Galle_ 21d ago

Frankly, nobody at all can be trusted with superintelligence, but if you put a gun to my head and insist that either China or the US gets a superintelligence, China is the lesser of two evils. And there's no path to "no superintelligence" where this doesn't happen.

So yeah, let's go ahead and cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma.

1

u/TopTippityTop 20d ago

Perhaps, but as a species we have made that call already. People are racing and will get to super intelligence.

In narrow ways, we are already there, as by several measures LLMs  currently go beyond the capacity of humans, such as in regards to maths, as well as some other evals... especially if you take speed into account. 

So now all that's left to decide is how we steer frontier efforts such that we increase the likelihood that superintelligence  turns out benign, and no one person/country controls it. 

Right now it is China and the US on this race, China has given all indications it will not slow down, and Bernie aims to make China be the only one on the finish line. It seems to me that would eliminate many worlds in which the technology could have had a positive impact.

1

u/Galle_ 20d ago

It doesn't seem that way to me at all. The US has descended into utter barbarism and completely abandoned the principles on which it was ostensibly founded. The men running the US tech companies are psychopaths. There is no desirable possible world in which these people win the superintelligence race.

1

u/[deleted] 21d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/theosssssss 20d ago

how many wars has China started since WW2? and how many wars has the US started since WW2?

how many countries has China bombed since WW2 and how many countries has the US bombed since WW2? I'm no fan of China and I'd rather not have China dominating the world given my country has been conquered by them in history but with what the US is up to lately there's a reason why almost the whole world is trying to distance themselves from the US.

2

u/Galle_ 20d ago

I never said they weren't evil. But please, tell me about how everyone who got thrown in Alligator Alcatraz deserved it.

3

u/Main-Company-5946 21d ago

We need an international agreement on ai

8

u/squngy 21d ago

Probably, but who would trust US and China to not keep working on it in secret?

2

u/OnceMoreAndAgain 21d ago

That'd be ideal but I think human nature is that such a thing won't happen until something truly catastrophic happens. For example, nuclear bombs being used actually caused the countries of the world to try to prevent anyone from using nukes again.

I think we'd need to see something horrific done by AI for countries to all work towards regulating it globally. Until then there's too much economic advantage to not agreeing to global regulations.

1

u/Kriztauf 20d ago

So we should just plow ahead until something catastrophic happens like we are with climate change?

1

u/Zcrash 21d ago

Good luck with that

1

u/Vegan-cock 21d ago

This is what it's about https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/11/risky-ai-research-pause-humanity

Are they full of shit? Maybe? Could this threat be real? Absolutely. I much prefer skynet over 2012 anyway.

1

u/Brilliant_Feed4158 21d ago

Yes that's what makes this so difficult.

The country with the strongest AI will have a lot of advantages. But AI cannot be too strong, or it'll kill us all (or disrupt society fundamentally) But neither China or USA wants to quit, as the other then might get too much ahead. Old men are governing and psychos lead the AI field, so we should not expect them do much.

We're doomed.

1

u/zimejin 21d ago

Not sure why the US is always so worried about China, meanwhile China just focuses on its people and territories. Not every country has this odd western imperialism mindset. 🤷🏽

1

u/guineaprince 21d ago

But you can’t “stop” AI. If the US stops progressing, you’re just giving the keys to China.

Skill issue.

1

u/Kriztauf 20d ago

Lol right? I guarantee the famously paranoid as fuck control freak running China wouldn't mind having an international framework in place that guarantees he doesn't lose control of his country

-1

u/doyouknowthemoon 21d ago

I can agree with that, there is a need for AI and data centres for security and protection from other countries and malicious actors, as well as the computing power for research, storage and expansion.
But with that comes a responsibility and ethical considerations for the actual protection of the people running the programs and the people and infrastructure that it could affect.

It’s like the digital equivalent of the first atomic tests and the downwinders.

1

u/stormdelta 21d ago

Plus having him buy into the nonsense "superintelligence" / AGI / ASI / whatever they want to call it this week makes him look stupid too.

There is no plausible extrapolation from current AI tech to any kind of sentient, let alone sapient, AGI. There just isn't. It's obviously theoretically possible, and there's probably going to be a lot of argument over whether it counts, but it's a pretty safe statement to say we're still nowhere near it and not looking to be anytime soon.

Meanwhile, there's a shit ton of real actual dangers (primarily human misuse) we need new laws/regulations to address related to AI that shit like this is a distraction from.

6

u/jso__ 21d ago

AGI/ASI doesn't need to be sentient. Where did you get that idea?

Sentience is an arbitrary, ill defined, and unverifiable criteria. All the AGI/ASI stuff is about the tasks that can be completed by an AI.

0

u/MetaCognitio 21d ago

What should happen is that development has to be open and the institutions must be accountable to report everything they create. Trying to slow the development of AI only puts the west behind China.

Trying to regulate is pointless, they will find technicalities that enable them to progress before the ink is dry on the regulation.

The only thing that can be done is to keep the companies open and accountable to very rigorous bodies that have the ability to punish them extremely harshly.

1

u/Kriztauf 20d ago

Should they not be required to find safety issues and attempt to build guardrails or should we just tell them to plow ahead and we'll just pay out damages later?

1

u/MetaCognitio 20d ago

Yes. The issue is the closed development nature for profit business will incentivize them to hide them in the name of profit.

2

u/Kriztauf 20d ago

Maybe that's why you should read their statements that they are making an argument for a international safety framework that involves publicly disclosing safety incidents the way we do with public transportation and airlines. They are open to this despite what everyone here seems to believe or not want them to do

0

u/rhineo007 21d ago

Regardless of who has the keys, it’s already been shown no one can control it. The world as we see it now is doomed.

-1

u/unethicalpigeon 21d ago

I'm convinced he's being played and taken advantage of due to his age and his desire to legitimately try and improve the world for people.

I'm convinced this entire thing is basically propaganda. The big AI companies can't keep going like this. They're going to bankrupt themselves. Basically the only one that can keep going like this is Google and even they aren't. Look at how they've been focusing almost exclusively on their flash models instead of trying to push massive leaps for their "pro" model.

This is the space race between russia and the US all over again except this time it's not government, it's private business, and private business tends to want to actually make money.

The big AI companies know they can't keep trying to one up each other like this or they're fucked. So now they push this narrative about how dangerous AI is and how it's going to kill us all. All of a sudden EVERYONE is saying it. People who have been happily working on this shit without a peep for years now all of a sudden it's going to kill us all? All of them think this? Are you fucking shitting me? It took them this long to notice? or it took them this long to care? YEahhhh okay.

Meanwhile at the exact same time the US government is bringing up chinese distillation of american models again. Months after it was first brought up. Now all of a sudden theyre bringing back up how the evil chinese are stealing american AI tech. At the same time as the American AI companies are talking about how "dangerous" american AI is. Yeah I'm sure it's a coincidence. Meanwhile china doesn't even have access to the "dangerous" stuff. They're using the front facing consumer shit.

So now all of a sudden out of no where you have musk, Altman, and Dario all saying the same thing. "AI is too dangerous, we need oversight, and we need to slow down." Bullshit. When has anything like this ever demanded oversight? It's ridiculous to think anyone believes this circus.

What they're really doing is all agreeing to actually try to make this shit profitable with what they have and focusing on efficiencies while they stop bankrupting themselves competing with each other to out do the others. Now this is where most people would say "But the chinese!". Remember the government saying how evil and scary they are for stealing scary american ai tech? Introduce a ban on US businesses (where all the money is) using chinese AI due to "national security" and there you have it. Now it won't matter if they fall behind temporarily while trying to stop bleeding money.

-1

u/TheDoomedStar 21d ago

You don't have to "stop" AI, you just have to wait until it does nothing useful and venture capital runs out of investment money to keep it artificially relevant. So far, we're halfway there, and getting closer to the finish line every day.

-1

u/Galle_ 21d ago

Okay, fine. China's more trustworthy than the US these days anyway.

0

u/k-trecker 21d ago

Yeah, why in the fuck are we fearmongering about evil China? Oh no Chinese industry will surpass us. Oh no China is powerful.

American capitalism is a far bigger threat to the planet, democracy, and society. 

1

u/Galle_ 21d ago

It's because it's the only argument they've got. They can't defend the indefensible, they can only try to appeal to a greater evil. And that argument might work if the United States hadn't spent the past decade descending into utter barbarism.

0

u/GalacticScale 21d ago

Yea that’s the whole plan 

0

u/Potential_Basis_662 21d ago

So, he's referring to people who would be using AI for shit like biological warfare.

0

u/Morbid_Aversion 21d ago

I know this is a pretty standard take but I find it crazy. It's literally like: "the guy across the street is building a bomb which could blow up and kill us all. Let's build our own bomb so we can kill ourselves first." We've already proved to ourselves that we cannot control AI, even at this infantile stage. There's no reason why a US AI is any less existentially dangerous for humanity than a Chinese one. You're just changing out the colour of the bullet that you're going to fire into your own head. You're dead either way.

-1

u/jso__ 21d ago

He's doing better than anyone else. While his policies aren't perfect (I'd prefer a slowdown to a stop, and some treaty with China is necessary), at least he's actually interested in regulating AI. Literally no one should be against that (even the AI companies want government regulation), but the Republicans are for some reason.