Take everything the daffy old Bolshevik, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), doesn’t understand about economics or technology, lay it end to end, and you could circle the Earth a few times with rope to spare. This is a man who never met a payroll, never sweated a bottom line, and has never — not once — done a recognizable day of honest work, from his washout as a carpenter’s apprentice straight through to his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. None of it stopped him from backing into a seven-figure fortune and three houses, which tells you exactly how Bernie thinks wealth appears: not from building anything, but from standing near the builders and demanding a cut.
Now the socialist who couldn’t frame a doorway wants to write America’s artificial-intelligence policy. Buckle up.
Sanders, with fellow traveler Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) riding shotgun, has introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, and for once “ban” is the honest word. The bill would freeze advanced AI development, stand up a brand-new cabinet-level federal agency, and — this is in the text, not a parody — empower that agency to oversee the physical destruction of noncompliant systems. Smashing the machines. The Luddites had the excuse of living in 1811. Bernie has a search engine and arrived at the same policy anyway.
The teeth are worse than the concept. Penalties are modeled on the statutes for illegally building nuclear weapons. A company that steps out of line gets a “corporate death penalty” — stripped of its right to do business in the United States. The engineers, researchers, and executives who actually write the code? Up to 20 years in federal prison. Two decades in a cell for software development, in the nation that invented the software industry. The ignorance and arrogance is staggering. The gift this would be to Beijing, borders on the treasonous.
But strip away the moralizing and this is the politics of envy, nothing more. It never matters to Bernie what’s being built or who we’re racing to build it — only that something is moving and somebody might get rich doing it. Are there real risks in this technology? Of course; every powerful new tool carries them. But you don’t manage those risks by jailing the people best positioned to understand them.
Here’s the part that should end the conversation. If America reins in its developers, China won’t. Beijing is going full tilt, and so are Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Cripple our side and we walk into that world flying the technological equivalent of a Curtiss Jenny biplane while our adversaries field sixth-generation fighters. Even Gary Marcus — an AI-safety expert, no industry cheerleader — said the bill “guarantees” America falls behind. The nonpartisan ITIF said it flatly: we stop, they don’t, and we eat the losses for nothing.
The lone comfort is that this thing has roughly the odds of passing that Bernie has of cracking open Thomas Sowell and emerging a free-marketeer. If you ever needed a poster child for term limits, here he is — proposing we jail our own inventors and hand the century to Beijing, and calling it compassion. Stupid on steroids.
