alt.hn

4/6/2026 at 9:57:54 PM

Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-a-threat-to-everything-the-american-people-hold-dear-a3286459

by fortran77

4/7/2026 at 1:14:16 AM

AI is probably in need of far more legal safeguards than we have now, but I am sort of tired of the "everyone will lose their jobs" narrative. There are so few jobs LLMs can fully automate. I think what will actually happen is that corporate CEOs will try to cut staff, it won't work, people will be rehired, and AI will largely make people's jobs easier and less labor-intensive.

by stonyrubbish

4/7/2026 at 7:45:22 AM

The way this always works in a corporation is people's jobs will be just as hard or harder and they'll hire far less people. As always happens productivity per person will skyrocket and median wages will somehow be lower.

by ragequittah

4/7/2026 at 12:28:40 PM

Real median wages have been increasing pretty consistently since the FRED started recording it: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

by namr2000

4/7/2026 at 6:39:48 PM

Apologies median wages was the wrong statistic to choose because the top x% rise has been astronomical. The productivity has gone up along with CEO wages. That money does get made even if the workers never see it. Or if they do see it they immediately give it back (and then some) when they pay their rent.

by ragequittah

4/7/2026 at 10:37:37 AM

No, my job is already highly LLM assisted and I just have more work to do. Because now I can tackle things on the backlog we thought could never be prioritized.

by anon7000

4/7/2026 at 2:27:12 PM

For now yes.

But you will end up finishing the backlog and once competitors get rid of employees and become more profitable your employer will do the same.

Right now we're in a transitional space. Doesn't mean things will stay this way.

by wolvoleo

4/7/2026 at 12:42:32 PM

I’m equally disheartened by the people who dismiss job losses as unlikely because “AI can’t automate entire jobs”.

What do you suggest happens when you automate half of 10 people’s jobs? Do you expect they want to pay for 10 people to operate at 50%, or would someone be more likely to just keep 5 people to do the part they couldn’t automate (yet)? Do you think CEOs will want to add 5 more heads back later, or do you think they will add the minimum necessary and still seek a cheap alternative to fill remaining gaps?

I absolutely agree with you that it COULD make people’s jobs easier, but unless that directly translates into revenue for the company, a relaxing easy day of work isn’t generally the goal of profitable companies.

by therealpygon

4/6/2026 at 10:37:00 PM

What do the American people hold dear?

by garbawarb

4/6/2026 at 11:32:13 PM

Pathological demand avoidance.

by kelseyfrog

4/7/2026 at 12:27:04 AM

In Canada, demands are not actually demands. That way if the demand is avoided, there never was a demand to begin with; however, if it was fulfilled, then of course there was always a demand all along.

by rdevilla

4/6/2026 at 10:42:21 PM

[flagged]

by neonstatic

4/6/2026 at 10:51:19 PM

It's extremely prevalent in Canada as well; almost certainly even more so. It's really a North American thing.

I expect copious downvotes with no actual replies. Then the comment will be flagged by the bot armies so the administration here can preserve its dearly held national identity of being "diverse" while never having elected an ethnic minority PM.

by rdevilla

4/7/2026 at 4:19:51 AM

I would expect more downvotes for your needless "I'm going to get downvoted because the sheep hate when wolves tell the truth!" persecution complex. Your comment was at least mildly interesting before you got to that.

by nozzlegear

4/7/2026 at 12:29:54 AM

wow why are so many comments in this thread against Bernie's stance?

by Ancalagon

4/7/2026 at 5:46:57 AM

Posted when Silicon Valley was awake and on a break from the Easter Monday working hours.

by sph

4/7/2026 at 5:53:46 AM

I don't understand what you mean - is this sarcasm directed at me or the Bernie disagreers?

by Ancalagon

4/7/2026 at 7:30:31 AM

The rich SV worker is overwhelmingly pro-capitalism and techno-optimist; Bernie Sanders is anything but that.

by sph

4/7/2026 at 12:31:35 AM

HN will flag and downvote anti AI sentiment. There is lots of it here, you just aren't allowed to see it.

by rdevilla

4/7/2026 at 3:57:59 AM

I posted Bernie's "Conversation with Claude" a while back, and it was just about immediately taken down.

Let's face it Y combinator is mostly AI startups for the next few years, and any anti-AI sentiment is going to hurt the bottom line.

That being said, I disagree with Sanders on a number of points. He wants to stop data center construction. Can't think of a more luddite un-nuanced solution to the "problem"

The real AI danger is not the threat to white collar jobs (which will simply have to evolve), but something we will see roughly 18 months now when Joe Schmo asks Claude Giga Max Supreme 8.0 to help him reduce his taxes, and it hacks into the IRS and deletes everyone's records.

by LarsDu88

4/7/2026 at 4:02:27 AM

You think there won’t be any taxes in 2028-2029 because of AI?

by jrflowers

4/7/2026 at 5:14:31 AM

Just an example off the top of my head

by LarsDu88

4/7/2026 at 12:35:33 AM

I feel like we must be visiting different websites.

by lizardking

4/7/2026 at 7:34:14 AM

Have you seen how overwhelmingly anti-AI the non-software-engineering world is? (despite the hypocrisy as plenty use a chatbot these days) The resistance in here is pitiful.

I'm lurking in the indie game dev scene, and any mention of using LLMs for anything is downvoted and laughed at.

by sph

4/7/2026 at 4:43:47 PM

Gamedevs are vehemently against genai art, but code generation seems more accepted from what I've seen

by fireant

4/7/2026 at 5:22:50 PM

Most discussion of using code generation on gamedev forums is taboo. As in, do what you want in the privacy of your own home, but in public, try to have some self-respect as an artist.

I've seen some "devs" livestreaming themselves coding a game using LLMs, and it's not pretty. But that's my opinion of vibecoding in general — it's the tool one uses when they don't want to think too much, which is the furthest path to greatness.

Some random examples off reddit (try to compare the sentiment if it had been posted on Hacker News):

- https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1rvafee/using_clau...

- https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1erb39r/is_it_poss...

- https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1qll8jr/has_anyone...

- https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1jitfbi/im_tired_o...

In general, interest in AI-assisted coding is associated with people that have no experience whatsoever and just want to make a game out of thin air without putting in the effort.

by sph

4/7/2026 at 8:08:53 AM

I'm the one who posted this link, and I think Bernie Sanders is a terible man. But an op-ed by a U.S. Senator in the WSJ about a tech issue seems like proper HN material. It's been un-flagged by the mods.

by fortran77

4/7/2026 at 8:26:35 AM

What are some of the terrible things he's done?

by fragmede

4/7/2026 at 8:34:43 AM

That would be off-topic.

by fortran77

4/7/2026 at 3:55:01 PM

We have threaded commenting here, so feel free to go off-topic.

by fragmede

4/7/2026 at 12:50:26 AM

[flagged]

by KetoManx64

4/7/2026 at 1:24:32 AM

I've heard this brought up many times but I don't really understand the implications of it. I can't really think of a system of government which hasn't killed large numbers of people. Even the USA's early wars like the civil war have death tolls >500k. We also lose ~7k homeless people every year.

Removing the contexts of those deaths makes it very difficult to evaluate the true causes and if the political ideology is to blame or if the centralization of power common across all governments leads to deaths.

by gravypod

4/7/2026 at 12:51:05 AM

Not a Bernie supporter, to put it mildly, but to be fair he has never called himself a communist. Making up BS doesn't help.

by CamperBob2

4/7/2026 at 1:04:40 AM

He honeymooned in USSR. Which is a rather odd place to honeymoon in 1988. But yes, he never explicitly said he was a communist, but just someone that wants to seize the means of production.

by bko

4/7/2026 at 4:02:42 AM

He literally said “I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production.”

https://pjmedia.com/ron-radosh/2016/01/18/no-new-york-post-b...

by Capricorn2481

4/7/2026 at 9:32:21 AM

The grocery store thing is a red herring, although its supported by nyc who by your logic is a communist? Thats hardly a definitive test. There are more relevant industries

In a 1976 interview, Sanders said, “I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries,” and when told that sounded like socialism, he replied, “Of course.”

“public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.”

More recently, Sanders has also been described as backing worker ownership plans, with reporting that he was encouraging workers to take control of the means of production.

https://reason.com/2019/03/14/bernie-sanders-wanted-public-o...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/14/politics/kfile-bernie-nationa...

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/bernie-sanders-workers-...

by bko

4/7/2026 at 1:25:00 AM

Sure has done a lot to support communism for someone that has never called himself a communist: https://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-fooled-by-bernie-sande...

by KetoManx64

4/7/2026 at 3:54:37 AM

My god dude. This is an opinion piece from the New York Post, which is a truly bottom of the barrel rag. Why are you posting this? You can plainly see how hard they are stretching the truth here. An actual anti-communist Republican already explained how stupid this article is [1].

They call the United Packinghouse Workers Union a communist organization, which is a flat out lie. The UPWA was a mainstream CIO (later AFL-CIO) union. It wasn't even among the unions the CIO purged in 1949 for being communist-led. By the time Bernie was involved in 1964, the union had formally banned communists from holding office under the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Code, and Martin Luther King Jr. literally sat on the commission overseeing that compliance. The union is famous historically for its civil rights work, not for being a communist front.

They said Eugene Debs was "arrested for espionage" which is a lie. He was arrested for being critical of the Wilson administration. It was under the "Espionage act," but it was not espionage, just good old-fashioned arresting people for speaking their mind. They neglect to mention Debs refused to join the Communist party when they split off from the Socialist party.

They implied the Young People’s Socialist League was a communist organization, when it was extremely anti-communist.

They said the "American People’s History Society" was an organ for Marxist propaganda, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that. They are implying this organization had a long history of spreading communist propaganda and that the Eugene Debs film is further evidence of that. But that's not the case. They just made a Eugene Debs film, which by itself, doesn't really rise to the level of Marxist Propaganda. He was a socialist, and an important figure in American History. Or is American History just supposed to cover the Carnegies of the world?

It's funny to watch people pearl clutch over a politician championing workers rights because it might overlap slightly with the politics of a distant revolution while we have a sitting President that kills citizens, bombs children's hospitals, jails journalists, and publicly salivates over the idea of inflicting retribution on anyone left of the alt-right. This is concern trolling at it's finest.

[1] https://pjmedia.com/ron-radosh/2016/01/18/no-new-york-post-b...

by Capricorn2481

4/7/2026 at 12:53:59 PM

> Why are you posting this?

What do you mean? NYPost became front page HN material some years ago.

by guzfip

4/7/2026 at 1:28:04 AM

The vitriol I see here only makes me like him more.

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

4/7/2026 at 7:07:14 AM

AI is the best thing that happened to America in the last decade, and I dearly hope that politicians don't try to ruin it the way they're ruining other parts of the country.

I respect some of Bernie's positions, but his stance on tech is dangerous.

by Reubend

4/7/2026 at 8:23:53 AM

AI is the best thing that happened for a relatively few number of privileged people, most of them being located in USA. This includes the programmers that may have benefited from using AI assistants.

AI has already stolen great amounts of money from a very large number of people all around the world, due to the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.

Moreover, there have already been a great number of layoffs, which truly or not have been blamed on AI. AI may have not been the true reason for those, but it certainly has provided a convenient justification.

There is no doubt that the number of people who have already been harmed by AI greatly exceeds the number of people who have benefited from AI.

There is no reason to believe that this trend will not continue.

When used in the right way, there is no doubt that LLMs and other ML/AI tools can ensure a significant progress, but from the recent history it seems almost certain that they will be more often used in the wrong way than in the right way, so most people will be negatively affected, not positively.

The problem is not AI itself, but the fact that AI is a tool controlled by extremely evil people, e.g. Sam Altman and Larry Ellison. It is very unlikely that this will change and this is the reason why AI will do more harm than good.

(There are a lot of examples that prove that individuals like those that I have named are truly evil, but I will just quote from TFA: "Larry Ellison predicts an AI-powered surveillance state in which “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on”". Even only this is enough to prove that Ellison is an enemy.)

by adrian_b

4/7/2026 at 11:59:18 PM

> AI has already stolen great amounts of money from a very large number of people all around the world, due to the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.

None of that is stealing. That's the free market.

by Reubend

4/7/2026 at 4:50:06 PM

Well it's not like AI investment money is coming out of thin air - ultimately normies are buying stuff that AI enhanced companies produce which allows those companies to feed this money to the actual winners/1% that truly benefits. I don't think that it's fair to say that AI has been only negative to the normies, when they need to be the ones willingly feeding the beast with their money for the whole thing to perpetuate.

That said I obviously also see a bunch of negative consequences, and perhaps agree that the negatives outweigh the positives.

by fireant

4/7/2026 at 10:36:19 AM

To America as a whole? How?

AI is certainly powerful, but despite tech CEO whitewashing, none of them are planning for how the economy will recover from a potential devastation of white collar jobs. Token bills fund rich investors & executives, not everyday Americans.

For AI to give me abundant free time & happiness, I need to have money, and I don’t see UBI anywhere on OpenAI’s roadmap.

by anon7000

4/8/2026 at 12:02:49 AM

> I don’t see UBI anywhere on OpenAI’s roadmap.

Do you really think it's OpenAI's job to create UBI? Surely, if you feel that it's a good idea, then it should be the government who sets it up.

We can't just magically freeze the economy in time. If we conduct our industries inefficiently just to keep jobs around, we won't be competitive on a global market.

I have strong concerns around the inflationary effects of UBI, but whatever the solution there is, it's not the responsibility of private companies to organize their own welfare systems.

by Reubend

4/7/2026 at 11:15:12 AM

For those of us who watched FB play the “move fast and break things” card, and are now watching the predicted effects of that play out, we think people like YOU are dangerous, and we respect people like Bernie for trying to pump the brakes (knowing the last 10 years have been downhill).

by mapotofu

4/7/2026 at 12:46:22 AM

Few notes:

The author uses polls that people are negative on AI, but people use it. All the time. And it's organic. Much like people started bringing Excel into the workplace and IT departments had to catch up, people are using personal AI and IT departments are freaking out. It's obvious that people find it useful (it's the fastest growing product in history). Why go off some polls that spread doomer nonsense?

Billionaires investing money in creating products that nearly a billion people use rather than improving the lives of working families? Are the billionaires elected leaders? Why is that burden on them. The government gets trillions every year, yet try to get people to believe they are just a few billion shy of providing medicare for all and free childcare. Give me a break

AI will create a police state? We've had cameras pretty much everywhere for decades, yet somehow unsolved killings reach a record high in 2023. We don't even bother locking up the people that get arrested. The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%

No one's buying it from these politicians anymore. You're in politics, you have trillions to spend. Just get your shit together, actually help people and stop with these hysterics.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

https://substack.com/home/post/p-149002604

by bko

4/7/2026 at 1:16:36 AM

It’s a threat to employment, stability, and democracy. AI is going to solidify the concentration of wealth and power like never before. It’s why so many young people fear being in the “permanent underclass”. I haven’t agreed with socialists historically but we need to change our economic and political system to have more socialism than before, and especially to reduce the concentration in the hands of a few individuals and companies. So he’s not wrong.

by SilverElfin

4/7/2026 at 1:42:49 AM

Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.

by 0xy

4/7/2026 at 10:42:12 AM

It wasn’t wrong every single time. In fact, many of the more successful social programs in the US happened as a response to extreme poverty and economic disruption (the Great Depression).

People need to get it into their fucking heads that things get really ugly and violent under systems of extreme income inequality.

So far, AI is not focusing on solving that problem, just making it easier for tech people to get richer.

by anon7000

4/7/2026 at 1:52:09 AM

The plow was regarded as a threat to democracy? I'm going to need to see some references for that claim...

by AnimalMuppet

4/7/2026 at 1:58:52 AM

(not OP but likely they're trying some "Luddites were wrong, too!" thing. And if so, also misunderstanding the Luddites)

by slater

4/7/2026 at 12:58:04 PM

Jesus, these people are so stupid, they can’t even ask an LLM to come up with a more comprehensible response.

by guzfip

4/7/2026 at 6:57:29 AM

> Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.

The scale and the speed of the changes brought about by AI are almost certainly going to be far greater than anything we've ever seen in the past. Scale matters. The entire value of LLMs is proof that scale matters.

by georgemcbay

4/7/2026 at 2:04:51 AM

[flagged]

by therobots927

4/7/2026 at 2:06:18 AM

I think flagging an op-ed by a sitting Senator that appeared in the WSJ is an abuse of the flagging system. I don’t like Bernie at all, but I thought it was a very relevant item to post.

by fortran77

4/7/2026 at 2:28:54 AM

[flagged]

by therobots927

4/6/2026 at 10:28:30 PM

[flagged]

by boznz

4/6/2026 at 11:00:53 PM

I would not call him an existential threat, but he is certainly not representative being on one of the extremes and old af

by verdverm

4/6/2026 at 11:03:10 PM

[flagged]

by EricHolden12

4/7/2026 at 12:54:56 AM

Brilliant

by neonstatic

4/6/2026 at 10:09:37 PM

[flagged]

by KetoManx64

4/6/2026 at 11:02:48 PM

Pray tell, for which special-interest groups is the venerable senator a mouthpiece?

by treetalker

4/7/2026 at 12:53:58 AM

Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept put forth by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle, derived from the observation that regulations are supported both by groups that want the ostensible purpose of the regulation, and by groups that profit from undermining that purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

by bko

4/7/2026 at 1:32:26 AM

People who want healthcare and maybe kids who would like school lunch I guess?

by robotburrito

4/7/2026 at 1:09:04 PM

This was my sense as well. I was unaware of Sanders's being in the pocket of any AI companies or folks, and I don't see any evidence to the contrary from the other commenters.

by treetalker

4/6/2026 at 10:13:49 PM

It takes a special, uniquely American type of politician to look at a war in Iran and conclude that domestic AI policy is the real threat to American people.

by bigyabai

4/6/2026 at 10:41:21 PM

Both of those things can be a threat to the American people

by Trasmatta

4/6/2026 at 10:54:09 PM

The US once had a strong reputation for a can-do cooperative spirit, and solving big problems.

Today, it has an equally significant reputation for divisiveness and creating potentially existential (in various senses) threats to itself.

by Nevermark

4/7/2026 at 12:31:05 AM

[flagged]

by johannesrexx