The poles of American politics are coming together over artificial intelligence. Left-wing socialist Bernie Sanders and right-wing strategist Steve Bannon have joined forces to push for more human control over the rapidly-evolving technology.
Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, and Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser, will both appear at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, alongside a diverse set of speakers, to convince Congress to work faster to curb the impact of AI.
The rare pairing of a progressive leader and a MAGA voice is a sign of how AI is upending political alliances.
What they are doing is proving that private corporations shouldn’t be doing primary research. They are so desperate for this tech because they believe it will eliminate the need for workers, that’s it. If AI research were being done in an academic setting with public funding (which it was until very recently), the kind of reckless, self-serving and deeply unethical borderline crimes against humanity that they’re committing would be unthinkable. Even DARPA wouldn’t be this unhinged. They’re using the entire human race as guinea pigs for an experiment meant to drive us into poverty, intellectual decline, and ultimately extinction. AI has many valid potential uses, none of which they’re actually interested in pursuing, because it’s not the most profitable application. At this point, controlled or not, they need to be demolished. The fact that they’re never going to actually achieve their goals doesn’t mean they’re not doing spectacular amounts of damage to the country and the world and they need to be stopped because the cost of letting them continue is quickly going to exceed the cost of stopping them.
I may disagree with Bannon on every other issue, but if even he understands this can’t be allowed I don’t think we can afford to gatekeep fighting back. Stopped clocks something, something.