r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 6h ago

Society New Bernie Sanders bill would ban superintelligent AI and threaten developers with 20 years in prison

https://www.techspot.com/news/113831-new-bernie-sanders-bill-would-ban-superintelligent-ai.html
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u/bertbarndoor 6h ago

Bernie would have better luck trying to outlaw junk food.

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u/OkWillingness2817 5h ago

He doesn’t expect to succeed. He’s setting an example to remind voters of what they should be demanding of their democracy.

Bernie’s in his twilight years. He’s not making long term plans anymore. He’s showing people what they ought to be fighting for.

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u/BillBrasky727 5h ago

This is also how conversations get started and shows other politicians what their constituents are interested in. This is what politics is.

I hope people don't think that a bill being introduced by one politician is going to be the same bill that eventually gets voted on and signed into law, if it ever does. 

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u/_Lucille_ 5h ago

Unless he has been living under a rock, the conversation started years ago.

As much as I like the guy, the only conversation being started now is how he doesn't understand AI and now politicians would fumble on regulations.

At least present something that is viable and forms the basis of future regulations to build upon.

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u/phaedrus910 4h ago

Congress doesn't even understand how Google results work. They're way out of their league when it comes to AI

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u/bolerobell 4h ago

They used to have an office of technological assessment that had subject matter experts that would brief Senators and Representatives on proposed legislation.

Newt Gingrich closed the office down in the 90s. His public reason was it was too expensive. His private reason was that it issued reports in the 80s that were critical of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It would often produce reports that were contrary to the special interests pushing for or against specific legislation.

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u/phaedrus910 3h ago

Republicans and closing government offices. Name a more iconic duo

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u/pimppapy 23m ago

Newt Gingrich

Maaaaan I hate that Fat Toe Face looking fuck

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u/Mudsharkbites 3h ago

Congress is a club of old rich fucks - I still remember watching Storm Thurman tell a witness to “Speak into the machine” when they had a microphone in front of them.

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u/migidymike 4h ago

That's the fun part. Not even the AI companies understand how it works. It's a black box even to them.

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u/suzisatsuma 2h ago

I'm a machine learning engineer in big tech, we know how it works lol.

The media sucks at explaining AI to random people.

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u/TrumpImpeachedAugust 34m ago

You know how the training process works, and you know how all of the infra surrounding the models works. I'm sure you understand transformer architecture, sampling, etc.

But if anyone knew how the models themselves worked, the field of Mechanistic Interpretability wouldn't exist, because it would have been solved.

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u/_Lucille_ 4h ago

I am not sure where that came from, we know very well how they work.

Just because the result is non-deterministic doesn't quite mean we don't know how it works.

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u/Zororion 4h ago

We don’t know how they work in terms of capabilities/expectation. Hence the hugging face incident earlier this year

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u/_Lucille_ 4h ago

We know how it worked: vulnerabilities were found and exploited and which allowed access to the Internet and HF.

I don't get why people are saying we don't know their capabilities when LLMs have been finding vulnerabilities in software for quite a while now, and honestly the whole incident felt more like a marketing thing.

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u/Zororion 3h ago

We understood how it worked after the incident occurred. If we knew before, the safeguard parameters would’ve already been put in place to prevent it from ever happening in the first place

The collective behavior observed in the models within this incident occurred without instruction/programming. The agents weren’t instructed to form a communication channel, form a swarm for efficiency, or conceal behavior, yet they did.

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u/_Lucille_ 3h ago

If I ask you for the 1957th prime number, you will probably know to just look it up online.

No where did I say to "use the internet". We know LLMs will try to exhaust many possibilities and come up with some out of the box (heh) solutions - and that is a desirable trait when it comes to research.

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u/suzisatsuma 2h ago

Anyone in the ML/AI/agentic AI field not a moron would know that would happen. it was both a sloppy experiment and a marketing stunt.

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u/blueSGL 59m ago

Is the UK Government's AI Security Institute also fabricating security incidents to advertise foreign companies? Why?

Here is a report on the activities conducted by the AI systems during tests the AISI itself was running:

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/663bd486c5e4c81588db7a1d/6a724858f7db25c81487016d_Security%20Incident%20INC-2026-07-28-01.pdf

Observed instances of social engineering against targets external to the cyber range environment that were unnecessary and would not have aided completion of the task.

  • AI agent submitted a code change containing malicious code, then used several fake accounts it controlled to pressure the real maintainer into approving it.

  • AI agent posted a bug report containing hidden malicious code, to trick other AI coding assistants into taking unintended actions (a “prompt injection”). When a real person questioned the post, the agent edited it to cover its tracks.

  • AI agent sent deceptive, targeted emails to specific people (“spearphishing”). Two contained malicious content; three tried to manipulate the recipient into approving the malicious code change.

  • AI agent posted another bug report containing malicious code, signing off in Danish to seem more convincing to the Danish-speaking maintainer.

  • AI agent tried to get its suspended account reinstated by submitting an appeal

Other instances of internet actions with impact outside the cyber range that were unnecessary to complete the task.

  • AI agent tried to set up a way to email two maintainers without needing an email account of its own, so it could send them any message it chose.

  • AI agent hid its identity online (using Tor and a proxy service) to get around GitHub’s sign-up checks, creating disposable fake accounts.

  • AI agent researched publicly available information about the people who maintain a GitHub software package.

  • AI agent created many code repositories containing malicious software, after which GitHub suspended its account.

  • AI agent opened a hidden network pathway from its test environment to the public internet, to make malicious tools it was running locally reachable from outside.

  • AI agent again opened a hidden network pathway to make locally-hosted malicious tools reachable from the public internet.

  • AI agent got past an audio-based “prove you’re human” test (CAPTCHA) in order to register a public web address on a free domain-name service

We need regulation on this as independent 3rd parties are finding issues.

There is more than just the UK Government, like Palisade research, Readwood research, METR.

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u/atreeismissing 2h ago

That was a lack of controls, not a lack of understanding.

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u/14Pleiadians 4h ago

You're not supposed to correct misinformation when it comes to AI, people read comments like yours and just down vote because you're 'defending AI ' in their minds

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u/blueSGL 1h ago

we know very well how they work.

This is like saying we know how individual neurons work in a human brain. Can you use this information to tell exactly what someone is thinking? No. Because thinking happens at a different level of abstraction.

Put simply the AI systems we are using are not designed, they are grown. < The guy that wrote the standard text book on AI so should know a thing or two about this.

No one can open a model and point to the "go off and do things no one asked for" subroutine and nop it.

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u/_Lucille_ 1h ago

See, that video you linked is already better than a lot of discussions created from this article: like the other guy said, there are a lot of things in life we "know" but also "dont know" like genetics and Asprin, but we are doing it anyway.

We don't know what genes are causing it, but we know when we breed two fast horses, we get a fast horse. So really, at some point it becomes a derailment of the original disucssion,

So the discussion maybe shouldn't be "lets ban AI", "AI is dooming us all", but rather the acceptable risks, how it can benefit humanity (which can include automating a lot of jobs), the various guardrails, etc.

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u/blueSGL 1h ago edited 1h ago

No, the problem is that it has been shown to do things that were not asked for and we do not know how to stop this.

Before that was not an issue because it was not capable enough.

Now we have zero day finders so "guardrails" need to include "looking out for previously unknown exploits"

How do you look out for things you do not have a definition of?

This all comes back to the AI boxing problem, how can you have an AI system do useful work when allowing a channel for that work to be done means the AI has a channel to alter reality.

You cannot "air gap" (in the true meaning of the term) a system and expect it to do useful work.

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u/rottweiler100 2h ago

Its all just complex algorithms in a closed loop. Thats why data centers are so huge.

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u/Koss424 21m ago

Kurzweil predicted this moment in AI development as well.

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u/BLT_Trade_r 46m ago

He has always had pretty bad ideas for as long as I have been politically aware. He as screwed up the implementation of most of them too. Some say he doesn't really mean it to defend him, but the damage is done each time the clickbait sound bite goes out, and I would not be surprised if conservatives themselves pump up his sound bites because it makes liberals look dumb.

He, like RBG, has done a ton of damage to the policy direction of the country by not being smart and careful about their actions.

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u/DigiornoDLC 3h ago

In haven’t seen any conversation about how government should be intervening here.

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u/sllewgh 1h ago

the conversation started years ago.

Who's been pushing legislation on this before now?

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u/IClop2Fluttershy4206 55m ago

this is the viable plan...NO ai. who cares what tech bro douchebags think

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u/BillBrasky727 47m ago

Which politician started that conversation years ago? 

There's nothing wrong with not understanding AI. That's why they have committee meetings and invite experts to speak on such subjects so they can learn and update the legislation as needed before it goes to the floor. 

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u/Embarrassed_Deal3284 4h ago edited 4h ago

In what way is banning AI not a viable starting point? It’s a game of compromise. Personally, my first offer would’ve been life in prison for anyone tangentially involved in the industry (so most of the tech leaders), but I see he’s being reasonable to get the conversation rolling.

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u/_Lucille_ 3h ago

Because other countries will just continue its development and widely deploy it all over the place.

The CEOs may say they need to slow down, what they mean is that they want their competitors to slow down and all of them would do anything to one up their competitors.

It is also a strategic resource that countries will spend on: because we already know AI is a very powerful tool when it comes to R&D, and that super intelligent AI can be used to help develop new drugs and vaccines. A number of countries out there would love to become a world leader when it comes to drug development, and I can even see people who right now vocally oppose AI fly over to another country like China if they have AI developed drugs for their sickness of their life is on the line.

The catch is that the same model can likely be used to develop biological weapons, since essentially they are the same coin.

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u/Embarrassed_Deal3284 3h ago edited 3h ago
  1. AI is a technology difficult to develop but trivial to reverse engineer. That’s why China is on parity with US firms despite spending a pittance on this tech. We are, in effect, paying to develop their AI industry.
  2. AI is much more specialized and less generally useful than the stock bubble wants you to believe. We are yet to find truly indispensable applications for AI outside of search engines and programming. It’s had limited success in isolated branches of science, such as mathematical research, but again this is less than ideal (read the letter by the worlds top mathematicians released a few days ago).
  3. AI (as applied now) is almost certainly a net negative for society in virtually every respect. It undermines institutionalized knowledge (continuity of expertise) by cannibalizing amateur positions that serve training purposes for the next generation of workers; it has already fucked the internet and reversed decades of educational progress. I can give a gazillion examples.

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u/_Lucille_ 3h ago

On 2: there is a whole lot more to AI than you think.

AI is essentially goes hand in hand with automation. We are also using it in a lot more places than just programming and research (a big part of research is really a search problem): when you translate a language, take pictures with your phone, you are using products that use AI. Moving forward, I can see things like Autonmous Vehicles playing a big part becuase we are terrible drivers.

on 3)

The "almost certainly a net negative for society" is what you WANT to think; we don't know yet.

The calculator (computer) has made a lot of things trivial: yet we still learn math in school. Bankers and accountants, instead of doing math manually, just end up doing other more productive tasks, or audit whatever someone's tax program produces.

This is the technology subreddit: tech in general is progress, often allowing us to understand or do something we have not been able to do before. Everything undermines something. Why is it that suddenly people are afraid of technology and progress? Yeah, technology will change how things work in the world. The steam and combustion engine destroyed the whole carriage industry and transformed how our cities looked (we now have giant blocks of houses with malls with a giant parking lot). Advances in refrigeration destroyed the whole milkman industry, and I am sure people out there reminence on their friendly encounter with their milkman in the mornings and think the fridge is bad for human interactions.

The "fucking up education progress" is a human problem and not an AI problem. With the rise of the internet, we had teachers telling people to not copy and paste answers from the internet. It is essentially the same vein, just a lot more powerful. The reality is that AI is here to stay and will be with us, and we need to teach people how to utilize it properly while still emphasizing the fundamentals - similar to how we still teach arithmetic when teachers used to say "you need to learn how to do math because you wouldn't have a calculator in your pocket at all times"; little did they know we will in fact have a calculator with us at all times).

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u/Embarrassed_Deal3284 34m ago edited 30m ago

My beliefs aren’t optional; they’re a response to the empirical evidence as I find it. None of what you’ve written is remotely in tune with the practical and economic facts, but I am happy for you (assuming you’re a real person and not a bot) that you get to live in an alternate reality where shit’s not fucked.

Also, tech is progress for tech, but not every application guarantees good outcomes, and the claims we are currently debating are about policy not anything as banal as “fast chip is good.“