We've been down this road before with cryptography. No, it's not going to work.
It doesn't seem to me like we have any guarantee that AI will contribute to public wellbeing. Right now, the public is socializing the losses while the industry privatizes the technology and cozies up to the federal government. LLMs will be usable for mass surveillance and war long before it ever leads us to a post-scarcity society.
If anyone can name a rational reason why the top comment is the top comment but this one deserves -4, please say so.
points gun from space
Always has been.
Banning automation is shortsighted and stupid; you refuse to let people increase the size of the pie because you're worried it'll make your fraction smaller. But a smaller fraction of a bigger pie is still a bigger piece.
> “Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control... That’s why I am introducing legislation to immediately pause the development of increasingly powerful AI and ban the creation of systems that humanity cannot fully control"
So I predict the number of people we will tolerate being killed every year to have good AI will be more than zero, much more.
I think right now, given this is all very new, we can and should be looking at regulation as we start to identify what shoudl be the upper limit.
You can thank the Oil and Car lobby groups for Congress' silence on car issues.
As long as that sweet sweet blood money keeps flowing into the pockets of politicians, nothing will get better.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If Sanders were actually serious about trying to make the world a better place, he'd be more vocal about impeaching Trump and support Congress' efforts to do so. I get it, AI's an easy target.
But the fact that both liberals and conservatives think of the other as 'evil' is a large problem.
The difference is that today, unlike in the 20th century, there's a feasible path to post-scarcity. It's not "around the corner" but there's a path if you squint. Myabe it won't pan out, but it's worth a shot. The irony is that leftists want to ban AI to preserve scarcity thereby protecting people's jobs.
It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector.
To which those employees respond: What will happen to us?
And they are told: things will be great, you won’t need to work in the factories any longer, and we will have no shortage of goods.
Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”
This process will take generations. Over time, people will work less and less as productivity steadily increases (we already see this in the pre-AI era as technology has accumulated). Eventually, AI will do all necessary labor and goods/services will be incredibly cheap. Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.
Also, it's possible that this technology just doesn't pan out. There could be a bottleneck or a nuclear war or whatever. Maybe it just stops scaling, or it stays in the realm of text-generation and can't replace manual labor. But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
That said, some displaced workers have experienced substantial difficulty moving to other industries, especially if those new jobs are in different cities or countries. And it is also possible that this time is different, although I'm not convinced.
If it weren't for that, we already live in a post-scarcity world. But as such a state is anathema to the human condition, we continually strive to create new forms of scarcity that can separate the elite from the commons.
Maybe there will also be world peace!
AI has achieved the same religious undertones as your average cult. Is the new god of the gaps for some tech people. The wild card to achieve anything.
Leftists oppose human suffering and disempowerment.
Labor is one thing, but there will always be some scarcity such as natural resources. I still doubt all labor could be done by AI alone at any point in the next couple generations.
Second of all, the massive redistribution shows no signs of appearing anytime soon. In the meantime the industry is in the midst of hysteria about a "permanent underclass" [1]. And this is all happening using models built off of the works of all writers, artists, and creatives everywhere, which said creatives have to then rent from the labs.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/ai-labor-work-for...
-_-•1h ago
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/2095542398084415952 “We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario.
That is why today I am announcing new legislation to do just that.”
GPerson•26m ago
Legend2440•22m ago
Oh, so anybody who disagrees with me is evil?
This is the kind of attitude that ruined US politics.
GPerson•20m ago
Legend2440•15m ago
We're going to use it to do incredible things that would otherwise be forever beyond our ability - a post-work economy, science fiction technologies, advanced mathematics, etc.
Gooblebrai•12m ago
> intelligence beyond human control. (1)
to
> that will obviously end humanity (2)
There's quite an assumption on the feasibility of (1) and even a bigger jump that from (1) follows (2)
Some people can have less apocalyptic / more pragmatic views of the potential of AI.
Varelion•20m ago
Legend2440•