As you’ve probably heard by now, a majority of Americans are pants-pissingly terrified about artificial intelligence and the havoc it may wreak on society. And while those concerns vary — some people are worried about losing their jobs, others about what it will do to kids, yet others about the ability to form a thought without help from a robot — the one thing that’s clear is that there is no stopping the technology, no going back to a time when a large number of people weren’t asking ChatGPT how to break up with someone or using Claude to remove the leaders of South American countries. (There’s also no stopping already extremely wealthy tech executives from becoming unfathomably rich.) Regulation, naturally, would be one way to try to rein in the AI juggernaut. Another? According to Bernie Sanders, the American people should take what’s ours, i.e., a 50 percent stake in the companies that will bring “unimaginable changes” to our lives.
The independent senator from Vermont met last week in his Washington office with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, a meeting that the tech founder requested after the democratic socialist wrote in a New York Times op-ed that he will be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, legislation that would give the public a 50 percent interest in the country’s largest AI companies, as AI has been built on “a public resource … the accumulated knowledge, creativity and labor of mankind.”
