Bernie Sanders and 'godfather of AI' warn about unemployment and lack of regulation

'This is an issue that will impact everybody's life,' Vermont senator says

Geoffrey Hinton and Senator Bernie Sanders at a discussion on AI at Georgetown University, Washington, on Tuesday.

Independent US Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday voiced his concerns on unregulated artificial intelligence with Geoffrey Hinton, widely considered to be the godfather of the technology.

"This is an issue that will impact everybody's life," Mr Sanders said at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy in Washington, referring to fears of labour disruption, among other concerns.

Mr Hinton said that unlike previous instances of labour disruption, that induced by AI poses completely different challenges.

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"This is very different because the people who lose their jobs won't have other jobs to go to if AI gets as smart as people or smarter," he said.

Mr Sanders asked Mr Hinton if he thought that some of the staunchest proponents of unregulated AI, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison, were concerned about the possibility of massive unemployment.

"They should be but I don't think they are," Mr Hinton said.

"Many of them haven't really absorbed that if the workers don't get paid, there will be nobody to buy their products, and they haven't really thought through the massive social disruption we'll get if we get very high unemployment."

In October, Mr Hinton joined the UK's Prince Harry, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and conservative activist Steve Bannon in signing a petition calling for a ban on on the “reckless development of superintelligence”.

Superintelligence is the hypothetical ability for AI tools to perform highly advanced cognitive functions and develop reasoning skills that would pass those of humans.

Mr Hinton has studied what would later become known as AI for several decades, but progress was painfully slow and developments were few until 2012, when processing power and high-speed internet hastened breakthroughs.

During his time as a professor at the University of Toronto, he oversaw research conducted by Alex Krizhevsky, a student who made use of neural networks and created an AI tool making it possible to identify and describe images.

In 2012, Mr Krizhevsky and Mr Hinton's breakthrough validated years of research into whether or not computers could mimic how humans process information.

Alphabet-owned Google took notice and quickly bought Mr Hinton's AI startup, DNNresearch.

This 2012 research project from students at the University of Toronto helped pave the way for AI image recognition.

In 2023, however, Mr Hinton quit Google, giving his concerns about AI development with little regulatory protection and the potential for massive labour disruption from AI, among other worries.

He later won a Nobel Prize in physics in 2024 along with John Hopfield for their research in "foundational advances in machine learning with artificial neural networks".

Mr Sanders has spoken out in recent years about his concerns on how the technology sector has approached AI.

US Senator Bernie Sanders issued a report warning of job losses fuelled by artificial intelligence.

In October, the Vermont senator released a report, The Big Tech Oligarchs’ War against Workers", which claimed that AI could "destroy 100 million US jobs in a decade".

Some technology executives and venture capital bosses have tried to hit back against such allegations in recent months, saying such criticisms are the result of fanciful "AI doomer" mindsets.

Earlier in November, Microsoft's AI chief Mustafa Suleyman appeared to be seeking a middle ground amid the intense debates about AI.

"Two things can be true," he posted to social media platform X.

"If you're not amazed by AI, you don't really understand it, and if you're not afraid of AI, you don't really understand it."