SEN BERNIE SANDERS: Artificial intelligence is coming for the working class. We must fight back
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most transformational technology in the history of the world—and will have a profound impact on the life of every man, woman, and child in our country. And, if you’re currently in the workforce, there’s a good chance it will take your job.
Recently, I took a trip in a self-driving Waymo car in San Francisco. There was no one behind the wheel. Waymo is already operating in 10 major cities and, along with other driverless car companies, intends to expand rapidly. In Texas, 18-wheelers are now traveling down highways without a driver. Left unchecked, it is likely that millions of truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, and rideshare drivers will lose their jobs in the next decade.
But it’s not just job loss in transportation. A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Jeff Bezos, the fourth-richest man alive, is seeking to raise $100 billion to purchase factories all over America. Not content with replacing the 600,000 workers in his Amazon warehouses with robots, he intends to do the same with millions of factory workers.
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Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the richest man alive, is converting Tesla into a robot company with the goal of building one million robots per year. What will these robots do? They will not only replace factory and warehouse jobs, they will displace workers in health care, grocery stores, the hospitality industry, call centers, and every other part of our economy.
AI will not only be devastating for blue-collar workers, but for white-collar workers as well. Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, said most white-collar work "will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months." A Stanford paper called "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" found there has already been a 16% decline in employment for younger workers in jobs exposed to AI—like computer programming and customer service.
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The reality is that the AI oligarchs do not want to just replace specific jobs. They want to replace workers. As Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, has said, AI "isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans." According to OpenAI’s charter, its mission is to build "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."
Why are AI and robotics being pushed so aggressively by Big Tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Altman, and Thiel? The answer is obvious. They are implementing a technology that will make them and their corporate clients even richer and more powerful. Why will any business want to hire a human worker when it can install AI and robotics and cut its labor costs by 80 to 90%? AI and robots don’t take a salary, need a vacation, require health care, or form a union. They just keep working—24/7.
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Replacing workers with revolutionary new technology is a good investment for billionaires. But for the working class of this country, AI and robotics could well be a nightmare. If AI and robotics eliminate millions of jobs and create massive unemployment, how will people survive if they have no income? How will they feed their families or pay for housing or health care? If workers and their employers are not contributing into Social Security and Medicare, what happens to these programs that provide life-and-death support for elderly and disabled Americans?
The American people see what is coming. And they don’t like it. According to a recent poll by Blue Rose Research, 79% of voters are concerned that the government does not have a plan to protect workers from AI job losses. Fifty-six percent are concerned about losing their job or having someone in their family lose their job in the next year. The next year!
Further, the overwhelming majority of Americans do not trust the motives of the AI oligarchs. For good reason.
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We’ve heard this story before. In the 1990s, the working class of this country was told by corporate America and their media that unfettered free trade would be a boon to the economy and that it would create millions of new jobs and raise wages. As many of us understood then, that claim was a lie, which is why we opposed trade deals like NAFTA and PNTR with China. The true goal of these deals was to shut down thousands of factories in the U.S., allow companies to move abroad where they could pay desperate workers starvation wages, and greatly enhance profits for large corporations. And they accomplished exactly what they set out to do.
Now, in the midst of the coming AI revolution, what should we be doing? It’s not complicated.
Congress must act to ensure AI benefits all of us—not just a handful of billionaires racing forward for power and profit.
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That is why I have introduced legislation to impose a federal moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until strong safeguards are enacted. What does that mean?
It means that if AI and robotics are going to be deployed, these technologies must improve the lives of workers instead of just throwing them out on the street.
It means that as productivity greatly increases, the workweek should be significantly reduced with no loss in pay.
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It means fundamentally rethinking the American social contract. If AI and robotics are going to create unprecedented wealth, we as a nation must guarantee all Americans a high-quality standard of living: decent housing, health care, education, and more.
It means that if AI and robotics will be used by children, guardrails must be established to make sure they do not harm their emotional well-being or their capacity to learn.
It means that our democracy must be secured from those who would use these technologies to lie and distort reality, and it means that our privacy must be protected from huge surveillance corporations that can use AI to increasingly track and record every aspect of our lives.
And last, but certainly not least, it means that we need to protect the American people and the world from the existential threat many scientists fear may be coming. If AI and robotics become smarter than humans, there is a real possibility they will function independently of human control, with possible catastrophic outcomes. That obviously must not be allowed to happen. The international community must come together to prevent this nightmarish scenario.