The progressive senator Bernie Sanders and rightwing strategist Steve Bannon have called for restrictions on artificial intelligence (AI) but offered competing visions for what they termed a “cold war” with China. Speaking at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington on Tuesday, the ideological adversaries were united in warning of the potential dangers of AI and demanding stringent guardrails against Silicon Valley’s “oligarchs”. But the populist pair offered very different perspectives on how to resolve the AI race with China, which Donald Trump and other Republicans have cited to justify moving full speed ahead with the technology.
Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, noted that Trump is due to host the Chinese president Xi Jinping in Washington next week. Sanders called for international diplomacy and a global agreement, including with Beijing, to ban the development of super-intelligent machines. He told an audience gathered in the ballroom of a Washington hotel: “A super-intelligent AI that escapes human control will not be an American problem.
It will not be a Chinese problem. It will be humanity’s problem. He said: “They understood that a nuclear war would not be good for the Soviet Union, not be good for the United States, not be good for the world, and they came together for a nuclear treaty.
With the survival of humanity at stake, they found a way to sign that treaty.” Bannon, who spoke directly after Sanders but did not share a stage with him, also used the cold war analogy but did not arrive at the same conclusion. The host of the War Room podcast and former White House chief strategist under Trump called for an aggressive economic and technological “quarantine” of China, demanding the immediate expulsion of Chinese nationals from US research laboratories, an end to the training of Chinese engineers and technologists and the total severance of capital flows. Did they take Russian kids over here to college to let them go to the best universities and get the best degree?
Did they have Wall Street slobbering to do their deals? Did they have every bank there to lend them money quicker than to lend anyone in this audience? They stood up to the Soviet Union and the first thing to stand up to them was to choke them off and that’s what we have to do today to the Chinese Communist party.
No deals, no agreements, you’re out of the AI business because we’re going to shut your ecosystem down.” Demanding immediate executive action to isolate Beijing’s tech sector, Bannon said: “No chips, no black marketing chips, no free ride off American technology, no steal on American tech … To hell with the Chinese Communist party.” Only then, Bannon argued, can the US have the time necessary to consider the proper regulation of the tech sector. He delivered a scathing verdict on major technology corporations and executives, accusing them of gambling with public safety for private profit. Bannon accused Silicon Valley of seeking to “socialise all the risk with the American people including potential bailouts” while keeping all financial upside.
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