Senator Bernie Sanders is, like most of us, worried about how AI is going to affect our future — but he's not convinced that the mainstream conversation is capturing the dynamics of how the tech is really affecting the labor market.

In an interview with Gizmodo, the Vermont legislator revealed that in the wake of his call for AI to aid in the establishment of a four-day work week, he has taken to speaking with AI experts and CEOs about the technology.

Though Sanders refused to name names, the tech luminaries he's been speaking with are apparently of two minds. In one school, experts warn that there "will be massive job losses," while others insist that new jobs will be created even as others go by the wayside.

"I happen to believe this is not like the Industrial Revolution," Sanders told Giz. "I think this could be a lot more severe."

As the two-time presidential contender noted, AI seems already to be accelerating the longstanding disparity between increasing worker productivity and those same workers failing to see the fruits of their labor. As the independent senator puts it, all that money instead goes "to the corporations and to the companies that developed that technology" — and the current existential struggle should be about AI helping rather than hindering labor rights and security.

"Workers today... are earning less, and I fear very much that almost all the new benefits of worker productivity will go to the people on top at the expense of working people," Sanders told the site. "That is something that concerns me very much."

"Unless we change the political dynamics, the benefits are going to accrue to the people on top at the expense of working people," he continued. "That to me is the most important issue. I want workers to benefit from this new technology, not just the people on top."

Still, he believes that "AI is neither good nor bad" — but that it's also "not science fiction" either.

"There are very, very knowledgeable people... who worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology," the former Burlington mayor said, "and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society."

Like so many AI doomers before him, Sanders believes that there may soon come a time when "we will not be able to control" the nascent technology, and that instead, "it may be able to control us."

"That’s kind of the doomsday scenario," he concluded, "and there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry."

All told, Sanders' AI take isn't all that surprising given the workers' rights rhetoric he's espoused for his entire career.

What sets him apart in the increasingly politicized AI wars isn't that he's cautiously optimistic about it, but that he intends to hold tech CEOs' feet to the fire to make sure the technology doesn't result in the kind of massive unemployment that so many have warned about. That show of integrity, at the end of the day, inspires much more confidence than the collective shoulder-shrug we're seeing from most politicians on the topic.

More on AI and politics: Elon Musk's Bizarre Behavior May Force Tesla Board to Step in, Analyst Warns


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