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Bernie Sanders’s New, Necessary, Bold Act: Taking on the AI Oligarchs
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Leading the anti-AI charge may be one of the last big acts in politics for the 84-year-old Sanders. And this is a critical mission. The Democratic Party and the country desperately need a leader who isn’t afraid of being portrayed as a Luddite or anti-business and will therefore forcefully air concerns about the proliferation of AI leading to mass employment, environmental degradation, and an even greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Sanders has stepped in this void. His advocacy could reshape discourse and policy on this issue, just as he has played a critical role over the last decade in getting the country refocused on income inequality.
“We’re looking at the most transformational economic revolution in world history, and Congress is way, way behind the eight ball on it,” the Senator told me in an interview last week.
The battle over AI is a natural outgrowth of Sanders’s focus on billionaires over the last year (and really much of his career.) Many of the people and companies that the Vermont Senator has long warned are growing too powerful are also big players in AI. So he rattles off the names of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg in his AI remarks, just as he did in his anti-oligarchy speeches last year.
