America is lucky that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) wasn’t in office for the advent of the lightbulb. We might all still be reading by candlelight.
On Wednesday, the 84-year-old formally introduced legislation that would impose a federal moratorium on all new data centers until artificial intelligence can be brought to heel. Sanders wants to hold innovation hostage until AI companies are prohibited from “releasing harmful products into the world,” whatever that means. His bill would even ban U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not impose all the “safeguards” he demands.
Sanders may be part of the lunatic fringe, and his bill is certain to fail in the current Congress, but he is tapping into real anxieties as he fights the future. He said Wednesday that similar proposals are under consideration in a dozen states, and more than 100 communities across America have already enacted moratoriums of their own. Federalism means these shortsighted localities will suffer as other jurisdictions leapfrog them, attracting jobs and tax revenue. But Sanders wants to hold back the whole country.
Future prosperity is never guaranteed. Sanders fancies himself a revolutionary, but he’s behaving like a reactionary — throwing sand into the gears of progress. He genuinely believes that he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who introduced the House companion of his bill, will be smarter about managing the diffusion of complicated technology than inventors, innovators, investors and end users.
During his Wednesday news conference, Sanders complained that Congress is “way behind where it should be in understanding the nature of this revolution and its impacts.” This seems like a good reason not to put legislators in control of frontier technologies. It’s worth celebrating that AI advances are outpacing lawmakers’ ability to suffocate the industry.
China certainly isn’t going to hold back its AI development at Sanders’s behest. And while the new technology will cause disruptions to the job market, that doesn’t mean there will be fewer or worse jobs. Markets respond with new innovations and opportunities much better than government ever could. Stopping data centers to slow AI is akin to opposing the production of wheels because they might pinch a few fingers.
Sanders says his ban on data centers will hurt “Big Tech oligarchs.” In that category, he includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Post.
Everyone would pay higher prices if Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez get their way. What they seem unable to grasp is that the largest technology companies that have already built data centers would actually be better positioned than new entrants under their plan. Start-ups would struggle to break into a field in which computing power becomes increasingly expensive to access because there’s not enough supply to satisfy growing demand.
Sanders was born closer to 1879, when Thomas Edison patented the first commercially-viable incandescent lightbulb, than today. The octogenarian seems determined to be remembered by history as the leading Luddite of the 2020s.
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