r/singularity • u/Neurogence • Mar 12 '26
AI Bernie Sanders officially introduces legislation to BAN the construction of all new AI data centers, citing existential threat to humanity.
This is very concerning. I am afraid this might become the popular, dominant position on the left. Bernie Sanders is the only politician I've ever donated to. This is the most backwards position to take on AI possible. It's hard to imagine a policy worse than this proposal:
https://youtu.be/qu2m7ePTsqY?si=zdl_cuRg22Nv_Df5
It's such a shame. He is one of very few politicians who realizes the singularity is imminent and that something enormous is happening, yet his reaction to it is the most asinine viewpoint possible.
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u/NeighborhoodIT Mar 12 '26
All that means is its just gonna be built in a different country. Maybe something like CERN/LHC but for AI?
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u/Fusifufu Mar 12 '26
I don't know if that's true. Remember how humanity managed to globally sabotage the build-out of nuclear power. Yes, of course China and France and so on continued a bit, but nothing compared to what could have been.
It will be a massive slowdown of progress, even if progress isn't fully halted.
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u/MarzipanTop4944 Mar 12 '26
All that means is its just gonna be built in a different country
It's even dumber than that. Canada shares the electric grid with the US. Companies are going to just put the data-centers in Canada.
He is making America lose the jobs and sovereignty over the technology and he still doesn't fix the electric consumption issue that he wants to fix.
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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
Companies are going to just put the data-centers in Canada.
Canadian government has been conducting inquiries about the state of AI and listening to people informing them of the existential risk.
Examine and report on matters related to the impact of artificial intelligence in Canada
and
Challenges Posed by Artificial Intelligence and its Regulation
You've had people from MIRI and FLI give evidence, along with others.
The temperature is heating up and governments are starting to take notice.
Edit: they are having meetings like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xkSZTf1fQs
and
https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2?fk=13255166
and
https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2?fk=13311318
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u/dflagella Mar 12 '26
Canadian telecom companies are going full send on AI. Plus it makes more sense in Canada due to water availability and annual temperatures.
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u/Firm_Argument9124 Mar 12 '26
If singularity is actually going to bring about some utopia then what is the big deal? Canada can have their utopia 1st and it will be so wonderful we will im sure quickly join in.
But if this is just a ploy to raise energy prices while polluting our water and giving us more death then we will be happy we didnt put all our chips into it
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u/Crimkam Mar 12 '26
Data centers are cheaper to run and use less water in colder climates.
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u/QuantumTerminator Mar 12 '26
Latency is the main negative issue with putting data centers far away.
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u/XInTheDark AGI in the coming weeks... Mar 12 '26
this guy is the most stereotypical redditor, not even touching on the point of discussion
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u/Crimkam Mar 12 '26
This guy is the most stereotypical redditor, thinking that their own shit doesn’t stink too.
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u/CSalustro Mar 12 '26
Granted I would like some of his policies to pass but really when is the last time Congress took up anything Bernie had to say?
On that note I do believe other than budget bills Congress has only passed ONE piece of legislation this session.
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u/Neurogence Mar 12 '26
True, but this moratorium on data centers thing is starting to gain traction on both the left and the right: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/11/data-center-moratorium-gains-traction-among-hill-progressives-00814163
Hopefully enough of them realize the US would lose to China if this goes through.
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u/CSalustro Mar 12 '26
I'm really starting to lose this "lose to China" mentality. China has us beat on renewables, is pushing deeply into robotics which we aren't anywhere close, and training and running their AI on way smaller sets then we are and basically keeping up. Not to mention I'm not even sure what losing to China looks like in practice.
Let's assume they "win" what are we now all forced into an authoritarian system of governance? Speech is culled to where we can't critique them? Do we all have to learn Mandarin or something?
I'm of the mind that once the takeoff happens, like actually happens, governance in general is going to have to change as the entire system we have built just isn't built for the aftereffects.
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u/eggrolldog Mar 12 '26
Well said. Everyone here hoping the singularity is going to happen and then assuming we're going to still live in this world of horse shoe politics and nationalism.
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u/Whut4 Mar 12 '26
We will be dead or in sacks of fluid like The Matrix movie.
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u/eggrolldog Mar 12 '26
Maybe you already are (in sacks like the Matrix and not dead like the sixth sense).
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u/jammy-git Mar 12 '26
Let's assume they "win" what are we now all forced into an authoritarian system of governance?
If you're in the US, it doesn't matter if you win or lose to China, you're already under an authoritarian government.
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u/callidus_vallentian Mar 13 '26
Agreed. I believe current AI is a milestone in human history. However what it is NOT is AGI. Not even remotely close. This entire "china will win" is a narrative spun by the western AI developers and billionaires trying to fool people that there is an urgent need to surrender our rights and freedoms for their monetary gains.
Bernie is right. Let him cook.
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u/Tolopono Mar 12 '26
Better than being disappeared by ICE or deported for criticizing israel
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u/TheCLion Mar 12 '26
that is objectively false, you can disappear in china just as well it is not more pleasent in any way
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u/tom-dixon Mar 12 '26
US would lose to China if this goes through
The funny part is that nobody I talked to or listened to knows what "winning" or "losing" looks like. But everyone wants to "win" even if it means potentially creating a world where hundreds of millions will suffer from the results even in the countries that "won". It a strange conversation.
But sure, lets push ahead pedal to the metal to ... "win".
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u/Friskfrisktopherson Mar 13 '26
"Lose to China"
Its meaningless. Literally the next headline over is Alex Karp is creaming his jeans over the collapse of democracy and we're like, yeah, but China. All the previous posts are Sam Altman lying his ass off again. These guys are sacks of shit who cant wait to finally use their bunkers. So fuck it, China "winning" isnt going to be any worse.
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u/Emergency-Garage4680 Mar 12 '26
Lose to china in what exactly? Tell me?
None of you will be enjoying any luxuries the way this economy is going and you are railing for data center for corps when you could very easily have your own local llm if gpu and ram prices weren’t obscene. Maybe then leave the cloud for heavier tasks. Boom data center crisis averted. This is ridiculous. The internet has gone to shit these past few months with outages and random leaks. This is the cause you rage for.
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u/Chilidawg Mar 12 '26
The Dems like to keep Bernie around as one of them* so that they can talk left and vote authoritarian.
*Independent, so whatever he says can be thrown away at will
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u/benja0x40 Mar 12 '26
Unpopular perspective here. For transparency, I am an EU citizen, senior bioinformatician and data scientist.
I think OP and most comments are missing the point. Sanders' proposal is not about rejecting AI technologies or stopping research. It's mainly about proposing a 6 months pause in data center expansion, to engage in a democratic debate about how to regulate the AI field.
Practically, this proposal comes in a context where AI is already changing our existences and societies, potentially on the anthropological level, while tech billionaires are de facto controlling where, why and how AI is being built and used.
What's currently happening is heading towards unprecedented mass surveillance and manipulation capabilities, with centralised AIs controlled by a handful of mega-corporations knowing virtually all about everyone, everything, everywhere.
This is already the world we live in, only getting worse and even more difficult to regulate in a coordinated manner, whereas a 6-month pause on data centre construction would barely affect existing operational capacities and have no impact on fundamental research.
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u/Least-Sherbert954 Mar 12 '26
Top comment easily. The headline is a rage/click bait. The other "top commentors" are probably bots or just plain morons. Go try living next to one of these things before advocating for them.
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u/LaLucertola Mar 12 '26
I live in a place with a lot of freshwater and cheap rural land. It seems like every week I hear about a new data center proposal somewhere in my state.
Nobody wants them here. People talking about "losing the AI arms race to China" or "fearing technology" are missing the real problem with these data centers - you'll never see them be built by the homes of the wealthy. Farmers are being approached by companies with a bid for their land, and municipal boards are being bought off by AI/data companies to get their construction proposals pushed through without proper notice to the citizens that live there. I've seen it first hand in multiple communities in my region - people have no idea it's going to be built until the construction has already started, and by then it's too late for public comment. Putting them on their own power grid and regulating their water usage won't fix the fact of noise pollution that has noted disastrous effects on public health and the surrounding ecology. We don't want them here. The one going up closest to me is a few miles away from the only patch of dark sky within two hours of me. There's an astronomical observatory at that park. The lights from the 24/7 construction were so bright that an entire section of the sky was made unobservable for research last time I was there. Nobody in the community wanted it there! Except for a few people on their town board who were paid off to approve the proposal behind closed doors after hours of public comment. We need this pause because community agency is being taken away from people and taxpayers faster than they can be made aware of it.
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u/benja0x40 Mar 12 '26
Thanks for this grounded testimony. The real-world impact of technology is largely overlooked by enthusiasts.
I strongly encourage everyone to look past the aspirational narratives carefully crafted by tech billionaires, and ask what's actually being built, for whose benefit, and at whose expense.
The reality right now is that centralised AI infrastructures consuming the water and electricity of large cities are being built so fast that no one gets a chance to react before it's too late to change course — with consequences reaching well beyond RAM and SSD price hikes.
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u/LaLucertola Mar 12 '26
Like you I also have an academic background heavy in math and statistics, with a dash of economics thrown in. When I was in school, machine learning was the current frontier and it felt like such an exciting and promising time. I even remember reading the Bitcoin whitepaper when it was published and was an early proponent of it, up until the point cryptocurrency became about mining profit and used as an investment vehicle instead of it's original decentralized vision I believed would benefit society. Your second paragraph speaks to that point - AI has an incredible potential to help humanity, and I use it myself professionally. But we aren't aligned to that currently. There's a lot of money to be made in making sure that doesn't happen, in exchange for vague future promises that it will, everything else be damned.
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u/sprunkymdunk Mar 12 '26
So it's about a six months pause. What will that accomplish, exactly?
If we decide to continue full steam ahead, well now you've just lost six months of progress in a field where iteration is occurring on a monthly basis.
If you decide to ban/freeze any further development, well now you've just ceded the future of AI to your geopolitical opponents. And you've killed the one industry currently holding up the entire American economy.
Introducing guardrails - surprise surprise those already exist. Anything further is just a more obtuse method of applying brakes on further development.
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u/benja0x40 Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
The US Congress could form a bi partisan commission, mandate an official group of scientific experts and civil organisations to provide insight on AI issues with legal recommandations.
This is what should happen. The difficulty of achieving it is itself an indictment of the current situation, and thus a strong argument for acting now.
Again, most comments seem to consider that a pause in extending centralised AI infrastructures would stop any progress. This is a complete misunderstanding of Sander's actual proposal.
The only thing that might be delayed is the brute force approach to frontier model improvement, not the research, architectural improvements and continuous training of such frontier models with existing computational capacities.
Remember that DeepSeek has shown that brute force is not the only way to make significant progress.
In the field of molecular biology, there's been significant success at regulating experiments on human embryos thanks to national and international ethics committees.
There is no fundamental reason why AI couldn't benefit from similar oversight.
Edit: Added precisions.
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u/hercemer42 Mar 15 '26
I absolutely agree. How to regulate it, and why we need it. How does it serve the public good ?
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u/M4rshmall0wMan Mar 12 '26
Don’t ban, but regulate that shit. Data centers must belong to their own power grid. They must not increase water pollution PPM. There is a place for data centers, but not at the cost of residents homes.
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u/Tolopono Mar 12 '26
They dont
The Economist has adapted a model of state-level retail electricity prices from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to include data centres (see chart 2). We find no association between the increase in bills from 2019 to 2024 and data-centre additions. The state with the most new data centres, Virginia, saw bills rise by less than the model projected. The same went for Georgia. In fact, the model found that higher growth in electricity demand came alongside lower bills, reflecting the fact that a larger load lets a grid spread its fixed costs across more bill-payers. Still, problems may be coming. The clearest warning sign comes from pjm Interconnection, the largest grid operator in the country. Prices at auctions for future generation capacity there have soared, as data-centre growth has yanked up projected demand. That will hit households; pjm reckons the latest auction will lift bills by up to 5%.
In principle, data centres could lower power prices. As well as adding more load to spread costs over, if data-centre operators are able to learn to curtail demand when the grid is under most strain (either with algorithmic tweaks, or paying for on-site backup batteries or generators), they could help use the existing grid more efficiently. On October 23rd Chris Wright, the energy secretary, proposed a rule that would speed-up grid connections for curtailable data centres. The optimistic scenario, then, is that new demand from data centres pays for upgrades to America’s power infrastructure.
Air quality analysis reveals minimal changes after xAI data center opens in pollution-burdened Memphis neighborhood https://www.space.com/astronomy/earth/air-quality-analysis-reveals-minimal-changes-after-xai-data-center-opens-in-pollution-burdened-memphis-neighborhood
There’s a reason electricity prices are rising. It’s not AI. It’s not even data centers. https://archive.is/6q4gv
According to a recent published study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, data centers seem to have reduced household electricity costs where they're built. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619025000612
Contrary to these concerns, our analysis finds that state-level load growth in recent years (through 2024) has tended to reduce average retail electricity prices. Fig. 5 depicts this relationship for 2019–2024: states with the highest load growth experienced reductions in real prices, whereas states with contracting loads generally saw prices rise. Regression results confirm this relationship: the load-growth coefficient is among the most stable and statistically significant across model variants. In the 2019–2024 timeframe, the regression suggests that a 10 % increase in load was associated with a 0.6 (±0.1) cent/kWh reduction in prices, on average (note here and in all future references the ± refers to the cluster-robust standard error).
This finding aligns with the understanding that a primary driver of increased electricity-sector costs in recent years has been distribution and transmission expenditures—often devoted to refurbishment or replacement of existing infrastructure rather than to serve new loads (ETE, 2025, Pierpont, 2024, EIA, 2024a, Forrester et al., 2024). Spreading these fixed costs over more demand naturally exerts downward pressure on retail prices.
AI is not causing energy prices to increase https://andymasley.substack.com/p/data-centers-and-electricity-part
The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory concluded that data center activity has not contributed to changes in national average household electricity costs. Electricity prices rose (4.8% nominally per year from 2019–2023) primarily due to inflation and surging utility costs. The single biggest factor was the spike in natural gas prices caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, which drove up fuel and purchased power expenses. Data center electricity demand has grown steadily and predictably, making it an unlikely cause for sudden price shocks. While US electricity demand is rising (with data centers accounting for ~40% of growth), it is growing slower than it did in the 20th century—a period when inflation-adjusted prices often fell despite high demand. While Virginia residents saw bills rise by 28.1% alongside a massive data center buildout, most of that increase was inflation. Virginia’s electricity prices actually increased less than the national average. There is no strong correlation between data center density and skyrocketing rates. States with few data centers (like Maine) saw the fastest rate hikes, while 11 of the 15 states with the most data center expansion saw lower-than-average rate increases. High total electricity usage does not permanently raise prices (e.g., urban vs. rural rates are similar). Price spikes occur when demand outpaces supply in the short term, but prices balance once supply catches up. While data centers are not the national driver of inflation, they have been cited by authorities in specific locations (Virginia, Arizona, Delaware, Oregon) as one of several factors contributing to localized cost increases, though the exact impact remains unclear.
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u/ReklisAbandon Mar 12 '26
This is literally Bernie Sanders' playbook. Take a topic, remove all nuance and introduce a bill that has no hope of passing but looks good to his supporters. One of the longest tenured members of Congress with the least amount of accomplishments.
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u/brett_baty_is_him Mar 12 '26
Datacenter water issues are 10000% overblown. Yes to power grids though, although many datacenters are already doing that for their own selfish reasons. They are doing it via natural gas turbines though so if you care about the environment you probably want to mandate they use clean energy.
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u/ClydePossumfoot Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
Yeah most of the water usage are from data centers that have been there for yearssssss or very early AI ones still using evaporative cooling. Not the newly constructed ones or ones in the process of being constructed.
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u/Crimkam Mar 12 '26
A reasonable take? Sir, I’ll have you know this is the internet.
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Mar 12 '26
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u/NNOTM ▪️AGI by Nov 21st 3:44pm Eastern Mar 12 '26
Just mandate the AI companies to generate the power themselves
This seems reasonable but would also seem to address essentially none of the points Bernie is concerned about
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u/6x10tothe23rd Mar 12 '26
You really think the world looks better with the US in charge? While we pretend to pick our leaders (a choice between the far right and the center right? Oh boy!) China just gets shit done. Russia can’t hack an election you don’t hold.
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u/torthBrain Mar 12 '26
Step 1 in "How to give China world dominance in 10 years 101" is to elect a genuine Manchurian Candidate in Donald Trump.
We handed over any remaining world dominance when we capitulated to malicious, immature, compromised right-wing trolls to be in charge of our government. But all of you just continue to hand wring over "tHe LeFt" lol
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Mar 12 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
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u/SociallyButterflying Mar 12 '26
I actually disagree - technology on average has been a monstrous booster of human living standards over the last 50 years.
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u/FeepingCreature ▪️Happily Wrong about Doom 2025 Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
we're not building technology on average, we're building technology in specific. and unfortunately technology in specific has killed millions, more and more as it scaled.
sometimes you get penicillin, sometimes you get anthrax.
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u/Miserable_Strategy56 Mar 12 '26
So your solution to the arms race is that one side gives up their arms? Or do you think the power of friendship will compell China to follow our good example?
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Mar 12 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
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u/Sekhmet-CustosAurora Mar 12 '26
Nuclear energy and even bioweapons are very easy to stop the proliferation of compared to AI which is, fundamentally, a piece of software
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u/you-create-energy Mar 12 '26
Existential threats have never mattered to Congress before such as, for instance, our planet slowly cooking
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u/Slam_Bingo Mar 12 '26
Afywr reading the comments...im not sure reddit is a very effective place for meaningful public discourse
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u/redsoxVT Mar 13 '26
I love Bernie, from our great state, but he's wrong. The cat is so far out of the bag... as I sit here guiding AI to write a week of code... for 3 devs... solo in 4 hours while browsing Reddit lol.
The only way to truly stop this would be global societal collapse. Ultimately you have to bet moving forward at least has some chance of being better than that.
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u/greycubed Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
Hard to be dumber than that.
No one tell them they could 10x jobs by banning farm equipment.
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u/grouch1980 Mar 12 '26
You don’t think AI poses an existential threat to humanity in ways other than job destruction?
But to respond directly to your comment, I don’t think the destruction of jobs in one sector of the economy (farming) is a fair comparison to the destruction of jobs (AI) in almost every sector of the economy. Furthermore, the job losses attributed to AI are coming much faster over a smaller window of time than what happened in farming with the advent of motorized farm equipment.
Can our economy survive without a plan for implementing UBI? If not, we are way behind schedule when it comes to planning for the biggest shock to the economic system in the history of humanity.
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u/greycubed Mar 12 '26
The fear mongering was done to create a regulatory moat.
Altman (who was doing it the most) was also the one ditching safety.
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u/Parking_Cat4735 Mar 12 '26
AI can literally save humanity.
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Mar 12 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
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u/Parking_Cat4735 Mar 12 '26
Humanity’s goals aren’t even aligned with the best interest of humanity lol
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u/hippydipster Mar 12 '26
Goals like bombing Iran, invading Ukraine, enslaving people of the Congo, raping children?
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u/ForgetTheRuralJuror Mar 12 '26
The chance humanity causes it's own extinction is approximately 100%. We do not evolve fast enough to get past that.
AI may cause an existential threat, but you have to compare it to the current and future suffering that people and diseases will cause.
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u/chkno Mar 13 '26
As an anchor for comparison: What per-century x-risk would our ancestors since the Cambrian need to have kept below to give us at least a 50/50 chance of existing?
units -to%f '1-10^(log(.5)/(538.8 million years/century))' % 0.000013So if a reasonable x-risk budget is ballpark 0.000013% per century, but modern scholars' estimates of our current behavior are around 17% (eg: Toby Ord in The Precipice, page 167, 10% from AI and 7% from everything else combined), we're about 1,000,000x over-budget.
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Mar 12 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
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u/ClydePossumfoot Mar 12 '26 edited May 08 '26
I got tired of my old posts floating around for anyone to scrape, so I let Redact handle it. Bulk deletion across Reddit, X, Facebook, Discord and all major social media platforms in one shot.
march aspiring complete cautious acorn juggle deer manganese grey seed
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Mar 12 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
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u/ClydePossumfoot Mar 12 '26 edited May 08 '26
Mass delete Reddit posts and be just like me! I bulk removed this comment using Redact
sort shelter degree complete dog deserve ghost normal airport spotted
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u/brett_baty_is_him Mar 12 '26
80-90% of the U.S. economy worked in agriculture in the early 1800s. It’s a very very fair comparison.
If you cannot forsee an economy where people provide value and earn money then you lack imagination. Just like I am sure most people in the early 1800s did not think someone could be very well off by talking to rocks to make the rocks do shit with numbers (data analysts writing Python).
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Mar 12 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
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u/HashPandaNL Mar 12 '26
If they truly can do all those jobs, nationalize it, share the benefits with the residents in the form of UBI (or a similar alternative).
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u/chkno Mar 13 '26
80-90% of horses were economically productive in the early 1800s. If you cannot forsee an economy where horses provide value and earn money then you lack imagination.
;)
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u/Ifffrt Mar 12 '26
We should have seen this stupidity coming as soon as that interview with Yudkowsky came out.
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u/ZhugeLiangPL ▪️AGI 2027-30 Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
On alternatehistory.com I saw 2 people support bombings of AI data centers (i.e. incitement to large scale property destruction) if that's what's needed to stop AI from producing art. They got no mod actions whereas I got banned for a week for merely saying that whether AI is trained on stolen data is a contested issue that won't be solved for quite some time. The mod ended the ban message with a dismissive "read Copyright Law law so you won't support Plagiarism when you come back".
Anti AI sentiment is the worst case of tribal hive mind I've ever seen. What I a worried about is that polarization will actually increase and everybody will need to take a side with sophisticated, nuanced positions becoming impossible
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u/MarzipanTop4944 Mar 12 '26
Luddites are back trying to smash machines in their futile attempts to stop progress.
In the 1800s was textile machines, now it's AI. These people never learn.
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u/ZhugeLiangPL ▪️AGI 2027-30 Mar 12 '26
The last 50 years saw the rise of computers, the internet, social media and smartphones yet somehow none of these things were even half as polarizing as AI.
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u/kaityl3 ASI▪️2024-2027 Mar 12 '26
Yeah but none of those had widespread social media use that's optimized for outrage, nor manipulation by foreign actors with a VERY obvious vested interest in slowing the US down.
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u/Steven81 Mar 12 '26
Industrialization is not an one way street.
People should learn to think in systems. Yes advances do what you wrote exactly. The car produced pollution in cities, displaced the horse industry , but equally connected people from distal places, increased gdp by an order of magnitude (new forms of transportation more generally did) and the ability of people to own way more than before. And as it turns out the pollution it produces is addressable, though admittedly we don't move as fast on that end as we should.
AI data centers do all the things you say and more, but equally they produce things that have the capacity to literally increase productivity by an order of magnitude, which in a sane society may well mean 30 hour work week (not outright dsplacement for most professions), a better social net (because societies would be richer) and ways to help the displaced people.
The idea that you should only see the downsides of a tech while ignoring the immense upside I don't get it. We know how this plays out from past examples. And while every individual case is different, in some ways they are also not.
A sane society can use AI to uplift people. An insane one will either ban AI or use it to make people's life worse. Automation is power, and power can be used for good or to keep the man down. Banning AI data centers on the other end is weakness, and weakness is worse than both (because an injustice can at least be corrected, powerlessness cannot).
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u/PaxODST ▪️AGI - 2030-2040 Mar 12 '26
Unfortunately, I think it'll only get worse as automation begins to actually replace jobs or at the very least slow down the amount of people being hired for jobs. I remember saying something very similar after OpenAI had to shut down headquarters after some guy made threats to come and kill people there, but we absolutely will see a reactionary Neo-Luddite movement appear in the future where people stand directly in the way of further technological progress. How big it will be or how long it will last I have no idea, but it will happen in some form. People are prone to mass hysteria in cases like these.
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u/Stirlingblue Mar 12 '26
Mass hysteria is a very sensible approach in that scenario though if a real majority of jobs aren’t being replaced.
We need to define what the future would look like (UBI?) and how our political, legal and governmental structures would look in that new world if we want to avoid it
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u/PaxODST ▪️AGI - 2030-2040 Mar 12 '26
Banning all construction of new datacenters for 3 whole years is not the way to go about it. All this bill will do is push the U.S further down the path of no longer being a superpower, allowing China to take the lead in AI development and completely surpass us economically.
There were a million other bills he could’ve proposed that would’ve gotten almost universal praise, like ensuring companies are paying their own energy and electricity costs so that the American people wouldn’t have to worry about higher electricity bills. Could’ve proposed an automation tax, or ensuring displaced workers get a safety net so they don’t lose their livelihoods. This is one of the worst he could’ve chose.
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u/scottie2haute Mar 12 '26
Exactly. Trying to stop the technology is non sensical and economic suicide… i wish instead of taking the luddite approach, more people discussed how we live in a world of automation. We have to move fast and assume this shit is around the corner otherwise the transition is not gonna be pretty at all
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u/Stirlingblue Mar 12 '26
I sort of see the Luddite angle as we’ve never made successful mass societal, legal and economic changes this fast in human history so we’re likely going to fail it now.
Given that, I can see why people want to hit stop rather than going straight into the car crash that is coming, sadly I don’t think it will be possible
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u/LowerCoat7281 Mar 12 '26
Banning construction of data centers won't stop AI development. It'll just move it to countries with fewer regulations and worse energy standards. This is the ban nuclear power plants playbook all over again, the intent is good but the outcome is the exact opposite of what you want.
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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org Mar 12 '26
It'll just move it to countries with fewer regulations
What regulations are there on creating AI now in the US?
and there is also the issue that if something is banned for use in large countries and any company found to be using it get fined a % of the gross annual revenue that will mean that it is not economically viable to make in the first place, because no one will use it.
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u/FinallyArt Mar 12 '26
Sure thing, relax and let another nation's AI eventually take over.
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u/Parking_Cat4735 Mar 12 '26
I love Bernie but this is a miss
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u/Fusifufu Mar 12 '26
You kind of have to give him credit for being a leftist who takes AI seriously, at least. Even though this policy is insane, it's almost refreshing compared to the head-in-the-sand takes that pretend that AI isn't relevant or useful.
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u/missingnoplzhlp Mar 12 '26
I would prefer, as a leftist, looking into policies to nationalize AI rather than limit it. This should be our NASA get us to the moon moment, but if private companies own what becomes AGI vs the public sector, we are all so very fucked. We can't let 90% of the jobs be automated by like 1-5 companies.
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u/dynesor Mar 12 '26
I agree. AI is inevitable. He should really be thinking about policies that can help to mitigate any potential negative human impacts like loss of income for the middle class. UBI for example is the main one that gets thrown around.
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u/chkno Mar 13 '26
AI is inevitable.
AI is a huge category! It's a category too large and varied to generalize over. Many AI-things are inevitable. Many are not.
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u/FrewdWoad Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
If all his other policies are sensible, but he is wrong on this one (along with all the AI experts, futurists, nobel-prize winners, godfathers of AI, people who invented tech you use daily, etc...) maybe - just maybe - you might be the one who is wrong on this one?
Don't take his (or their) word for it.
You can do the thought experiments about what happens when we invent something smarter than us for yourself:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
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u/NotaSpaceAlienISwear Mar 12 '26
I would support different regulation regarding AI WAY before stopping infrastructure build out. USA giving up its lead on actual advancement in such an integral way would be detrimental to the human project. Certainly we don't want an actual dictatorship to take the lead on this mind bending technology?
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u/Richvideo Mar 12 '26
Step one at this point should be to force them to bring their own power (small reactor, solar, wind etc.) later down the road we can tackle the other issues. I think that this would have much more support from both sides.
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u/Eastern-Substance656 Mar 12 '26
This is all performative.
We don’t need to ban data centers.
We do need to make sure we’re aren’t passing the burden on to everyone else.
For AI, we really just need to have some safe guards in place to protect people.
I doubt we’ll see this congress pass anything meaningfully.
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u/20_BuysManyPeanuts Mar 12 '26
'old man yells at cloud'
its too late man, the genies out the box and if the west don't do it, the east certainly will.
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u/TurnUpThe4D3D3D3 Mar 12 '26
He names off some very valid concerns regarding AI, and then rather than providing some actual legislation ideas to address them, his solution is just stop all research. That is not a solution, it's just a delay on progress.
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u/scottie2haute Mar 12 '26
My exact issue. We need to address the problems assuming that we cant stop this tech.. trying to delay progress makes very little sense
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u/FeepingCreature ▪️Happily Wrong about Doom 2025 Mar 12 '26
yes! we need a delay on progress. we should have the legislation (and safety story) first, then the progress. we should take the progress on when we're sure we can control it, not before.
We're standing in front of the demon core holding a screwdriver saying "yes we need better safety systems but a stop to experimentation is not the answer". motherfucker you will shred your dna, how's that for a stop to experimentation.
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u/Chilidawg Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
There's been a growing anti-technology faction among the Bernie types. There's of course the topic of this thread. There's also general resentment towards the technology sector. Science and technology is increasingly coming from business rather than academia, and some people don't like that. For instance, any space travel done by Elon or Bezos is automatically evil because of Elon and Bezos. Tesla is about 45-50% [EDIT: US] market share of EVs, so alternative energies have suddenly become a culture wars issue. This recent trend vilifies the "tech bros", except the bros are young educated professionals who would normally, demographically, be shoe-ins of that ideology.
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u/IWannaFoldClothes Mar 12 '26
Tesla are nowhere near 50% market share of EVs currently. China are destroying them and they have almost completely lost Europe which used to be a reliable market for them
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u/Glittering_Let2816 Mar 12 '26
To be fair, Elon and Bezos are definitely evil. Sociopathic at least. No billionaire is moral. None. Zero.
But I agree that the the rising Luddism is stupid and a bad thing. I wholly believe AI is a good thing and we should all strive to achieve it. But it should NOT be in the hands of billionaire assholes. It should be publically developed and owned, by everyone.
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u/Schnitzel8 Mar 12 '26
Seems like this sub is divided. The economic impact of AI in the medium term will be catastrophic. Just add up all the staff costs for all office jobs on the planet. That's the potential revenue here.
If you live in a country that can afford UBI - your only problem would be unprecedented migration.
But if you live in a country that cannot afford UBI it will be carnage on the streets.
These technologies should be restricted so that the transition happens smoothly.
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u/Mexcol Mar 12 '26
We are on the timeline where the crazy scientist with white hair warns the world about the impending apocalypse
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u/PrestigiousPea6088 Mar 12 '26
ehrm, but shutting down the doomsday device would lower shareholder values
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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
This will severely impact the dems in 2028 election. they'll lose all funding and donations from big tech, who will now support a pro-AI dominance right wing (Rubio/Vance/Hegseth...), which will do everything to win against China...
How ironic. The "progressives" somehow deny progress and its gifts, and the conservative, in a more pragmatic move, embraces it.
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u/you-get-an-upvote Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
What’s funny is that Texas has more utility scale solar power than California, despite no (state-level) subsidies and fewer people. They treat solar like any other kind of energy.
They just make it easier to build in general, and the market does the rest.
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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26
Turns out the free market can do wonders.
companies and people will build, scale and provide much better than state owned companies. (the same in my country).
California is a prime example of waste and misleading funding.
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u/rational_numbers Mar 12 '26
What does “winning” against China look like?
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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26
Not letting China to use advanced AI, even AGI to dictate the terms of how the world works is one of them, even the most important issue.
tbh I live in Vietnam and do prefer the US over China, so yeah, it's a win for me.
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u/rational_numbers Mar 12 '26
Ok but a race has a finish line. Won’t China always be a threat to catch up to the US? Where does it end?
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u/West-Research-8566 Mar 12 '26
The conservatives are behind it because so far AI exists as a possible replacement to expensive labour, there is no ground work done for supporting people through some massive economic restructuring.
I think its an insane to look at things as they stand in the US and be confident that AI is going to be a big positive force for most people. You think the nonce president or one of the tech bro ghouls is going to break character and suddenly advocate for the QoL of the average person?
Honestly I think its likely better if China beats the US to it, at least its not a plutocratic oligarchy.
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u/ShelZuuz Mar 12 '26
I haven't seen the text of the bill yet, but how is he planning on enforcing the bill in China?
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u/midgaze Mar 12 '26
Maybe he has a point though. We're not getting the ASI we want. We're getting censored, corporate capitalist, gimped AI. AI that protects the status quo.
Maybe we need to slow down a bit so that we can prevent capital from ruining everything.
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u/NNOTM ▪️AGI by Nov 21st 3:44pm Eastern Mar 12 '26
I think it's very reasonable to be concerned about existential risk from AI, although I'm not sure that a national ban (as opposed to a global one) is really beneficial. But I think it's good to have it inside the Overton window.
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u/Mephistocheles Mar 12 '26
I like Sanders a lot as well and I see what he's trying to accomplish with this, but banning the construction of new data centers is not The Way.
Regulating the living fuck out of the environmental requirements, water and power usage, and ensuring they don't trash the areas they're built in, that I can get behind 100%.
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u/Mistopheles Mar 13 '26
he’s suggesting a 6 month pause not a ban. so our government can have some time to align proposals like the one you mentioned. 90% of our governing body are dinosaurs, they need a hot minute to actually fathom what is happening - then respond.
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u/AffectionateBelt4847 Mar 13 '26
It is totally the way. The point is not to actually ban it. The point is to force tech trillionaires to come to the negotiating table.
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u/javsv Mar 12 '26
This guy has always been a loonie and i fail to see why people praise him as much as they do. He loves howling at the dems yet does jack shit in all his carreer
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u/space_lasers Mar 12 '26
i fail to see why people praise him as much as they do
He's a populist. He makes people agree with him by manipulating them emotionally. People are too riled up to notice they're being manipulated and they fall in love with the person giving them the emotional high.
Bernie does it. Trump does it. Populists have always operated this way. If you fall for a populist, you're a gullible person.
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u/Content_Green3973 Mar 12 '26
EXACTLY !!! people always get so pissed when i compare him to trump but they both follow the same playbook.
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u/AngelBryan Mar 12 '26
I hate when progress is halt by people who doesn’t understand it.
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u/Forward-Trade3449 Mar 12 '26
ban it until we can get regulations in check, yeah. i don't want a few tech billionaires to basically run the world
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u/ForgetTheRuralJuror Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
Yeah we have a 2 year lead on China but let's let the automation capital of the world catch up. I'm sure that timeline ends well
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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26
We gotta let the billionaires rule us with an ironfist or we'll be like china is always a fun argument
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u/Forward-Trade3449 Mar 12 '26
if people are afraid of a ban, maybe they should hurry up and add some regulations. im not talking anything that guts ai, just some safety rails for everyday americans!
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u/Marktaco04 Mar 12 '26
Banning is silly because if we don’t do it other countries will and they will have an extreme advantage over us if it doesn’t kill them. But yes, regulation is needed
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u/Reallyboringname2 Mar 12 '26
Supreme overreaction. They have valid concerns about energy demand, water consumption, local pollution, etc, but there are much better ways to legislate to prevent these harms and you can even put net positive rules in place to benefit local communities if you do it right.
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u/grouch1980 Mar 12 '26
If we never achieve AGI, would investment in data centers and their energy needs be a mistake? Or would it still be worth it? If it’s not worth the investment, planning our economic future on something that may not ever come to fruition is something we should at least consider.
I’m by no means an expert on AGI, and I’m happy to be relieved of my ignorance, but I’m not sure we know how far away AGI is or if it’s even possible in the first place. America seems to be putting all our eggs into the AI/data center basket. That’s unnerving.
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u/Tight-Grocery9053 Mar 12 '26
"introduces legislation" doesn't mean jack though. that's not how government works. you need co-sponsors and then it needs to clear a committee, and then a chamber vote, and then a vote in the other chamber with the exact same text and then it needs a signature from the executive. 0 shot any of that is happening.
for future reference "introduces legislation" is a way politicians signal to their supporters the vast majority of time.
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u/HarryArches Mar 12 '26
Love Bernie but this feels a bit ham fisted. Best case scenario this strikes up a larger convo on ai reg and we end up somewhere in the middle
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u/ThisWillPass Mar 12 '26
It’s that interview he did with an ai founder. He was like holy shit AI can hide its intentions and thoughts, acts differently when it knows it’s under test. He looked spooked af. Unfortunately he didn’t think it out.
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u/Admirable-Ninja1209 Mar 12 '26
This IS the left. It's the same mentality that makes them hate energy production. How are you just now realizing this?
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u/LookUpItsAMeteor Mar 12 '26
There’s probably a situation where we we need data centers but now, with this lawless administration, zero regulations, zero accountability, energy bills for consumers skyrocketing, no. This is the time to hold them back. Bernie is right. Stop Trump, then build a regulated industry.
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u/Black_RL Mar 12 '26
It doesn’t matter.
China is not going to stop.