Bernie Sanders & AOC

Bernie Sanders: For being here, the congresswoman and I are gonna be chatting about an enormously important issue. Let me start off by saying that in my view, and in the view of people who know a lot more about this issue than I do, we are at the beginning of the most profound technological revolution in world history, period.

The most profound technological revolution in world history, a revolution that will bring unimaginable changes to our society in a relatively short period of time. Artificial intelligence and robotics will impact our economy, our democracy, our privacy rights, our emotional well-being, our environment, and even our very survival as human beings on this planet. The scale, scope, and speed of this transformation will be unprecedented.

According to Demis, Hassabis, who is the head of Google DeepMind, the AI revolution will be ten times bigger than the Industrial Revolution and ten times faster. In other words, AI and robotics will have a hundred times impact in terms of what the Industrial Revolution did. And it's not just what AI companies are saying, it's what they are doing.

This year alone, four major AI companies are expected to spend roughly six hundred and seventy billion dollars building data centers, and tens of billions more on research and development. Despite the extraordinary importance of this issue and its impact on every man, woman, and child in this country, AI has received far too little serious discussion here in our nation's capital.

I fear that Congress is totally unprepared for the magnitude of the changes that are already taking place. While Congress has not paid attention or enough attention to this issue, the American people have. According to a recent poll, seventy-nine percent of voters are concerned that the government does not have a plan to protect workers from AI job losses.

That same poll also found that fifty-six percent of voters, majority of voters, are concerned about losing their job or having someone in their family lose their jobs in the next year. Not in the next ten years, in the next year. Why are the American people so concerned?