SANDERS: WE NEED MORATORIUM ON DATA CENTER CONSTRUCTION, AI

Compiled by Laura Sager

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling for urgent policy action to “slow this thing down” as tech companies race to build ever-more powerful systems. He will soon introduce a bill requiring a moratorium on the construction of new data centers and a pause on development of AI technology. Here’s why:

“This the most dangerous moment in the modern history of this country,with Congress and the American people very unprepared for the tsunami that is coming,” he said. “Congress and the American public have not a clue about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution.”

“This is a revolution which will bring unimaginable changes to our world:

This is a revolution which will impact our economy with massive job displacement.

It will threaten our democratic institutions.

It will impact our emotional well-being and what it even means to be a human being. It will impact how we educate and raise our kids.

It will impact thenature of warfare, something we are seeing right now in Iran.

Further, and frighteningly, some very knowledgeable people fear that what was once seen as science fiction could soon become a reality. And that is that super intelligent AI could become smarter than human beings, could become independent of human control, and pose an existential threat to the entire human race. In other words, human beings could actually lose control over the planet.

“And in the midst of all of that, all of this transformative change, what I have to tell you is that the United States Congress hasn’t a clue, not a clue, as to how to respond to these revolutionary technologies and protect the American people. And it’s not only not having a clue, they’re out busy raising money all day long from AI and their super PACs, which is a whole other problem.

“As many of you know, the AI revolution is being pushed by the wealthiest people in our country, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and others. All of these people are multi-billionaires who, if they are successful at AI, will become even richer and more powerful than they aretoday.

Sanders continued: “What I want to do now is not tell you my fears regarding AI and robotics. I want you to actually hear from them, the billionaires who are pushing these technologies. Listen carefully to what they are saying:

• Elon Musk, the wealthiest person alive, stated that, “AI and robots will replace all jobs. All jobs. Working will be optional.”
• Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicted that “AI could displace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.”
• Amodei also said, “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”
• According to Demis Hassabas, the head of Google’s DeepMind, “The AI revolution will be 10 times bigger than the industrial revolution and 10 times faster.” You got that? That means it will have 100 times greater impact on society than the industrial revolution had.
• Jeff Bezos, the fourth richest person in the world, has been pushing his staff for years to think big and envision what it would take for Amazon, which he owns, to fully automate its operations and replace at least 600,000 warehouse workers with robots. As many as 600,000 jobs gone, robots doing the work.
• Bill Gates, also one of the wealthiest people on Earth, predicted that humans “won’t be needed for most things,” such as manufacturing products, delivering packages, or growing food over the next decade due to artificial intelligence.
• Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, said most white collar work, quote, “will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
• Jim Foley, the CEO of Ford, predicted that AI will eliminate “nearly half, literally half of all white collar jobs in the U.S.,” within the next decade.
• Larry Ellison, also one of the richest people on Earth and a major investor in AI, said that there will be an artificial intelligence-powered surveillance state where, “citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”
• Geoffrey Hinton, considered to be the godfather of AI, believes there is a 10 percent to 20 percent chance for AI to wipe us out.”
• Mark Zuckerberg, the fifth richest person in the world, is building a data center in the state of Louisiana, a data center that is the size of Manhattan, that will use three times the quantity of electricity that the entire city of New Orleans uses every year.

“Now, for many years now, leading experts have called for regulation and reasonable pauses to the development of artificial intelligence to ensure the safety, the very safety of humanity,” said Sanders. For example:

“Elon Musk said back in 2018, “AI is far more dangerous than nukes, so why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane.

“What are we willing to risk?

“In March of 2023, over 1,000 business leaders in the big-tech industry said, prominent scientists, AI researchers, and academics co-signed an open letter titled, “Pause giant AI experiments,” stating: We must ask ourselves, should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of controlof our civilization?

“Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.

“Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors.If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

“That is what some of the leaders in the AI industry have said. And clearly where we are right now is that there has not been any pause. There have been massive amounts of competition between one company and the other, between the United States and China.

“So, bottom line is that, in my view, to protect our workers from losing their jobs, to protect human beings from attacks on their mental health, to protect our kids, to protect the safety of human life, we need a moratorium on data centers. We need to take deep breaths. need to make sure that AI and robotics work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.”