200 years ago, the Luddites destroyed textile looms and cropping machines in a vain effort to resist technological innovation. Now, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) are trying to do the same thing with the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act. Or at least they’re acting the part of modern-day Luddites to secure political control over who gains from technological innovation.
The moratorium would ban building new data centers that train AI models or have a peak power load above 20 megawatts. The moratorium would last until another federal law is passed that requires AI products to be approved by the government and that redistributes corporate gains from AI.
This bill won’t have the votes to pass Congress, regardless of which party controls it. Democratic senators like Mark Warner called the bill “idiocy” and John Fetterman called the bill “China First.” Republicans also won’t pass such a moratorium. Many conservatives support of President Donald Trump’s AI framework, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is signaling that he will move to codify it into law.
So, why would someone introduce a bill that is remarkably poorly written, short, and has not a snowball’s chance in hell of getting passed? Messaging.
AI is such a new and nuanced issue that Americans aren’t quite sure where to fall on it. AI is being used in the workplace with 12% of employees using the service daily and around 4 in 10 companies adopting the technology according to Gallup. Pew Research Center found that half of voters in both parties are more concerned about AI than excited about it, and a NBC News poll found that voters perceived neither party to have good policies for the issue.
Sanders and AOC see an opportunity to make AI a partisan football and, in the process, win over a chunk of voters who are concerned about AI’s future. At the same time, it allows them to push the economically populist and socialist wing of the Democratic party into the limelight. This is evident from what the bill would actually do – prevent innovation until the gains from it are redistributed away through government force.
Sanders’s and AOC’s objectives are a rehash of the Luddites’ from the 1810s. The Luddites attacked and destroyed machines in an attempt to win bargaining power against innovation. Today, Sanders and AOC are using the same tactic, destroying technology to wield bargaining power over AI companies, hoping to grab power to redistribute the gains from technology. The justification for this redistribution rests on the false claim that workers will be hurt by the new technology.
While it’s true that jobs are lost when industry shifts, it’s also true that as productivity increases and products and labor become cheaper and easier to obtain, new businesses and products come into being faster than old ones disappear. Across the economy, technological innovation enables more workers to have varied well-paying jobs.
Consider the first industrial revolution. When America was founded, essentially everybody was employed in agriculture. Machinery, tractors, and other equipment changed that. By the mid-1800s, only 50 percent worked in farming, and in the 1930s it was only 20 percent. Today, less than 2 percent of Americans work in agriculture. America is infinitely better today in terms of material wellbeing than it was when everyone was a farmer.
While messaging and promoting unserious legislation is a pastime of Sanders, AOC and their ilk, it does, of course, create openings for America’s enemies to pounce. China is rapidly expanding its AI models through dominating the open-source market. China is developing computer chips to compete with ours and has unveiled a five-year plan to ensure that it happens. In the meantime, they are smuggling American chip technology to stay in competition with American companies. Likewise, beyond the mere economic benefits of AI, it has massive positive implications for the future of war as demonstrated in the Maduro raid and in the Iranian war.
Whether we like it or not, we are in a new cold war with our adversaries over AI, and crippling this fledging industry would make Americans less safe. If Sanders and AOC wanted to address AI, they would work with the other members of Congress and the president to implement the White House’s AI framework. Unfortunately, as is typical for Bernie and AOC, they’re not trying to make AI innovation work for the American people, they’re trying to make it work for themselves.
