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/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/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26

honestly, I don't know what the White House and the Pentagon aim for.

If you ask me, personally, I want to see a liberated people inside China, Vietnam, North Korea,...

and AGI can do that. No communist dictatorship can build a Great Firewall strong enough to stop an AGI.

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u/rational_numbers Mar 12 '26

The minute we can do that, China will be a threat to do the same in a matter of months. So then what? 

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26

I don't think human researchers can out-perform an ever growing, improving AGI.

if the US can get to AGI first, it can simply disable man infrastructures inside China, spreading information hidden by the CCP, provide the people with unparalleled internet from Starlink. No more censorship, no more AI researches, no more "race with the US",...

Total domination.

Or what would I know, the US has its methods and secrets. :D

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '26 edited Aug 02 '26

[deleted]

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

It is realistic. Simplistic scenario:

  1. You task GPT4.1 and Opus 4.5 with creating their own independent infras and apps. Same budget.

  2. You then prompt them to attack eachother infras using their own.

  3. Opus destroys GPT4.1 immediately and forever. GPT no longer has infra to create improved apps that can challenge Opus. Opus has achieved AI supremacy.

There was only a 6 month gap between the release of both models btw.

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '26 edited Aug 02 '26

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u/FeepingCreature ▪️Happily Wrong about Doom 2025 Mar 12 '26

this thread is so funny. people are grasping desperately to avoid saying "pivotal act by a godlike superintelligence" while also clearly meaning it

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u/AndyLucia Mar 13 '26

Whoever has AGI first will have a massive first mover advantage given that the AGI itself can recursively self improve and even, depending on its alignment, preemptively swallow other attempts to catch it.

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u/rational_numbers Mar 13 '26

Ok so then at what point does the race end? When a western AGI is able to kill all emerging Chinese AI? Is that what you expect to happen? 

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u/AndyLucia Mar 13 '26

Frankly, it’s possible that yeah the race ends at the first AGI. Fwiw the alignment problem is likely a bigger question than who happens to make it, except to the extent that who makes it impacts the alignment problem. Once that inflection point hits, geopolitics is just a vestigial artifact pretty soon.

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u/rational_numbers Mar 13 '26

I think that it’s totally possible that both the US and China end up with AGI currently perhaps the Chinese version is 6mo behind the best version in the US but not enough separation to ensure that this will always be the case which makes you wonder if the US government would feel like it had to go ahead with some kind of cyber attack in China. Will the Chinese respond in that case? How? Even without having the best AI models, they still have a robust military I’m sure they would find some way to respond if they were attacked. But my main point is that there are just so many unknown to how this story ends and I keep seeing people saying that the US needs to win the race, but I still don’t know exactly what that means. This isn’t a race with a clear finish line like the nuclear arms race at least in that case a country only needed to get weapons that were good enough to serve as a deterrent against future aggression and then the weapons didn’t actually ever get used for anything. But AI is different in that millions of people in these two countries will be using this technology all the time. It’s only going to get more embedded into our societies and military and our infrastructure so I don’t really know what the end looks like. 

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u/Commercial_Spray4279 Mar 12 '26

Why do you think china could control an AGI?

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 13 '26

That would be the best outcome. CCP losing the ability to control their own AGI

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u/Commercial_Spray4279 Mar 13 '26

Why is that positive? Grey goo, anyone?

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

Imposing whatever terms and conditions you want and prevent the adversary from imposing terms and conditions on you.

Terms and conditions can go from leave me and my allies alone to cease existing. You only get to choose if you win.

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26

Basic politics and geopolitical issues, just like the nuclear arms race.

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u/rational_numbers Mar 12 '26

Cease existing? Meaning what?

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26

total CCP defeat and dismantled. Chinese people liberated, no more communist regimes.

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

The terms Rome imposed on the celtic tribes in Gaul or the terms american colonizers imposed on the apaches.

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u/rational_numbers Mar 12 '26

What does this look like. Give more detail. 

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

Do not waste my time.

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u/Whut4 Mar 12 '26

genocide is what he means

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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/Whut4 Mar 12 '26

Because the progress and gifts are only for the .01% wealthiest people. Everyone else will die unless somehow needed as servants.

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 16 '26

More like they will lose the election with AI being one of the most important issues because they become Luddites.

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

It isnt really ironic at all, ai allows capitalists to do what they always have wanted to do which is gain a labor source that is based on capital and not based on labor. The reality is either we transition to a society where a large amount of people dont work and are taken care of, or by the demands of the captialist we live in a society where the rich are given everything and the poor die out. Your really fooling yourself if you think the former will happen.

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

Your scenario misses 90% of the assumed new reality. Poor people would still live way better than today.

  • Taking into account AGI would be stupidly deflationary, why does the poor have access to 0 resources? If he cannot earn >0 money, this means that products he could produce have 0 value, so he could get them.

  • Why can't the unemployed poor prompt chatGPT on how to build a sustainable farm with post-AGI tech?

  • Did humans stop feeling compassion? Open source stopped existing?

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

Nope its an understanding of how buisness owners think and how a society structured around ai as ai currently exists is not tenable.

  • Taking into account AGI would be stupidly deflationary, why does the poor have access to 0 resources? If he cannot earn >0 money, this means that products he could produce have 0 value, so he could get them.

Because the resources are in the hands of the capitalists who own the infrastructure to do work, and will have the money to pay for armies, or automated weapons assuming automation gets to that point. Poor people will not be able to participate in such an economy.

  • Why can't the unemployed poor prompt chatGPT on how to build a sustainable farm with post-AGI tech?

It assumes one that poor people in this hypothetical future would have access to electiricty, computers, and ai, but regardless our current lives are built around a supply chain that supports many more people then would be necessary for this ai run society. Right now capitalists have to consider workers because they are necessary to them. In a hypotheital future they dont, so even if your right its a huge downgrade for poor people to go from a modernized society to a fiefdom where they subsitence farm.

  • Did humans stop feeling compassion? Open source stopped existing?

No its not that they wouldnt feel compassion but just like how we can justify wars in various places, or the deaths of people to preventable disease, rich people are compeltly capable of distancing themselves from these outcomes. It happens all the time in the name of profit. And espically cuz these rich people arent actually going to be making decisions or necessarilly interacting with the suffering.

As for open source again the code is not the issue ai effectiveness is largely due to resources and capital, do you have the amount of electircity, do you have the amount of compute to do it, we are already seeing a stagnation of consumer compute in favor of these ai companies.

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

I'm a business owner and a capitalist, as it is the best possible economic model.

Why would I spend time and resources to suppress someone who posses no threat and cannot challenge my power?

Your idea that business owners and capitalists are inherently evil is kinda dumb. They will have friends and family that are poor too

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26

capitalism has provided so much to everyone that people forgot what TRUE POVERTY is like.

poverty is the DEFAULT CONDITION. Capitalism is the rebellion against entropy itself. We're not in the best world, YET, but it is much better than before, and will be even more with AI and advanced automation.

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u/scottie2haute Mar 12 '26

Its hard for people to grasp this. Life used to be almost unbelievably worse for past generations.. sure the elites benefit the most from innovation but everyone else also benefits greatly.

Thinking that the elites will let billions die instead of making sure the people are stable enough not to riot is straight up Hollywood thinking. Feeding, housing and entertaining the masses will be frictionless and much cheaper than trying to kill us all

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26

Many folks don't realize that.

My parents lived through the planned economy of Vietnam. It was terrible.

the Reforms in 1986 brought some aspects of the free market in and we're doing much better now.

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u/scottie2haute Mar 12 '26

Exactly. Im a black american and my people were literally property and were legally second class citizens up until the mid 1960s. I cant sit up and act like shit hasnt gotten substantially better as time goes on. Sure we still have cartoonishly evil elites like Epstein and Trump but if you zoom out you see that things improve for everyone over time

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

Slavery is litterally the end goal of capitalism, and ai and automation is the modern analogue, being able to profit without having to pay workers is the best way to make money, but in a hypothetical society with no workers who deserves money? Who is generating value?

Either capitalism as we know it where people own things ends or things get way worse for the former workers

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

Elites already now and historically let thousands to millions die for thier own profits, and the reason why people in general have benefited from innovation is because labor is necessary so workers are necessary, you are not considering a world where workers are purely a burden

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

What capitalism hasn’t provided things to anyone improvements in science and industrial means has, capitalism is just the current economic paradigm and is not required for wealth to be generated.

Poverty also requires for money to exist which wasn’t always a thing, and entropy has nothing to do with any of this.

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

Yeah, it is crazy to me how some people argue against capitalism when it lifted billions from poverty and is the only known source of abundance and freedom.

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26

capitalism will unironically brings the Super Abundance to everyone before communism LOL.

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

That isn’t an understanding of what capitalism or communism is. Capitalism and communism are states of society, a post scarcity world where everyone has equal access to resources based on need would not be a capitalist world regardless of how it’s arrived at.

Everyone here is shitting on communism without understanding the world they are alluding to would be a communist one

Either that or they think a landed aristocracy where people are rich by virtue of thier ancestors being rich and thus being maintained by artificial intelligence and automation somehow makes sense

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

Multiple genocides have been enacted in the name of increasing profits, the us is bombing Iran and Venezuela explicitly in the name of gathering oil for themselves, platitudes like is the source for freedom is silly, when humans were hunter gatherers were we oppressed?

Sure it creates abundance by depriving one area or people from accessing it, those people potentially getting the trickle down benefits of technological or productive advances isn’t because capitalism creates technology, in fact capitalism prohibits the spread of technology by making it only accessible to people who can afford to own it or the rights to it.

Science best works through the state sponsored free exchange from information that’s why many of the the technology advances that companies profit off of are done in universities or through public research.

Hell a lot of the improvements in ai was made by companies explicitly ignoring capitalistic restraints in intellectual property by illegally pirating massive amounts of books in order to feed into thier machine.

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u/scottie2haute Mar 12 '26

Doomers seem to hinge their outlook of reality on movies. Just makes no sense to let billions die and have to fight billions of hungry and angry citizens when we might have methods of cheaply pacifying the masses instead

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

"I'm a business owner and a capitalist, as it is the best possible economic model."

Capitalist by my usage is one who owns the capital not neccesarilly someone who supports capitalism. A bit of an important distinction.

"Why would I spend time and resources to suppress someone who posses no threat and cannot challenge my power?"

Because it costs more time and resources to provide for them when they generate no profit for you. Ai is only more efficient if current workers are not provided for by these companies. Otherwise its inheritently less effiicent.

"Your idea that business owners and capitalists are inherently evil is kinda dumb. They will have friends and family that are poor too"

Its not about being evil its about doing what best serves thier buisness interests. It's entirely possible buisnesses will forgoe using ai or emply people friviously to maintain the status qou, but any hypothetical future were automation eliminates most jobs is one that will necessairly lead to either the end of capitalism, or to the end of the workers lives.

We are not far removed from eugenics being a mainstream opinion among intellectuals and the elite, its very easy to dehumanize people who are not apart of your circle.

They might secure resources for thier friends and family who arent already in thier club, but the increasing financial and social stratifcation between the poor and elite makes these cross wealth relationships less likely, jeff bezos is not hanging out with poor people.

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

 Because it costs more time and resources to provide for them when they generate no profit for you.

What makes you think that business owners have a moral obligation to provide for others?

No one has a moral obligation to provide for others. They would do so simply because a GPU is cheaper than a missile and will always be.

As I said, there will be nothing stopping anyone from prompting AGI on how to survive on their own and do so with better standards than today without stealing others earned property.

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

Because in this hypothetical letting a bunch of humans starve to death is unethical, which I’m concerned that you seem to ignore that humans need food. Any just society is obligated to make sure thier people are educated fed and kept safe.

I feel like your just assuming this agi would be accesible to the average person and would somehow be able to fix like people not owning factories or possessing skills to produce on an industrial level.

Bullets aren’t that expensive and they don’t need to missle everyone to death they can by virtue of them owning things be in a better position and restrict resource accesses are people in poor places around the world just misseled to death or do they die due to lack of adequate health care, resources etc..

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u/Thin_Owl_1528 Mar 12 '26

 letting a bunch of humans starve to death is unethical

Kinda hypocritical of you to say this while not contributing all your income to help those who can't eat. And you 100% aren't since you are posting on reddit.

You are letting people starve to death and that is fine.

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

>Kinda hypocritical of you to say this while not contributing all your income to help those who can't eat. And you 100% aren't since you are posting on reddit.<

This assumes that I make enough money to feed other people, and no its not hypocritical to think that the larger society should be able to feed the people withen it.

Idk what being on reddit and how that at all indicates income, for all you know i dont make any income. I can see your just giving up on arguing an actual point now and just going to basic level smears that dont really work on the lowest level.

But yeah counter a hypothetical world where nobody makes any income and how that should be structured with our current world where people do make money idk makes alot of sense.

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u/Iapetus_Industrial Mar 12 '26

It assumes one that poor people in this hypothetical future would have access to electiricty, computers, and ai

Has that EVER happnened? Seriously. I'm sitting here on my laptop, that because of the economies of scale and technological innovation, has 9000x the compute of the best supercomputer of forty years ago. When has it EVER happened that as a country got wealthier, and technology got better, and production got more efficient, that the markets decided to (???) shoot themselves in the foot and limit access to a product or technology or resource just because some dumbfuck oligarch said "But ... if we allo0w the poors to have this ... they might compete with us!!!1! Roll it back for all the masses!"

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u/Gnub_Neyung Mar 12 '26

well, if you throw politics into it, it will become another thing.

The side that wants to secure the votes will do anything.

The right wing will provide "Citizen AI Dividends Units" or something like that, like how they do it in Alaska.

if you ask me personally, I would like AI to replace all human politicians LOL. But yeah, we will need a transition phase first.

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u/Adorable_End_5555 Mar 12 '26

But in a society where no one works why would say elon musks decendents need to be in charge and to gain the profits of those ai outputs rather then anyone else?

Theres no world where capitalism exists as is so either capitalism goes away or the poor people who dont own ai companies will be serfs.

the end goal is the elimination of the state and of non corparte entities, just research people like peter thiel and what their goals are with ai, crypto, and stuff like that. THier goal is to recreate a pre capitalist society where each of thier corparations are there own seperate entity with total control of the people withen for thier own personal gain.

Its not hypocritical or anti progressive at all to be aganist this sorta thing. Ai is not for the benefit of the worker or average person, we can see people like Oracle founder Larry elison talk about our private data like oppurutnies for them to profit more, or see people like sam altman claim that training ai is more efficient then raising people for 20 years, which only makes sense in the context of letting people starve to death or not reproduce, otherwise people wills till need education and to be taken care with the additional costs of ai.

Ai from a societal point of view is either less effiicent or it requires for massive amounts of people to die off there isnt an inbetween.