On today's panel with Bernie Sanders

David Scott Krueger
Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:00:29 GMT

It’s sort of easy to forget how close Bernie Sanders was to becoming the most powerful person in the world. The world we live in feels so much not like that place.

I’m in Washington DC for the next week, and I’ve just finished a public appearance with Senator Sanders (should I call him Bernie? Or Sanders? or…) You won’t often see me so dressed up and polished. But this is important!

There are politicians who have principles and character, who really believe in doing what’s right. I think you have to respect them whether you agree with their views or not, and I think Senator Bernie Sanders is one of them.

Never has my belief been so validated as when I saw him start to speak, loudly, CLEARLY, publicly about the risk of human extinction from AI. It’s the latest in a long line of “well, I’m clearly living in a simulation” moments.

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that Sanders would take a stance here. You don’t have to be an expert to understand the risk from AI. You just need to care enough to spend the time looking into it, and to speak out even if it feels risky. But somehow it wasn’t in my bingo card that he would become THE most outspoken advocate on this issue. I hope this makes an impact on the parts of the left-wing that still think AI is all hype.

I’m also not giving up on Trump getting worried about AI. There’s a way in which Trump and Sanders are similar -- they’re both sort of populists, they’re not political establishment candidates. Again, to realize we’re taking an insane gamble with AI, you just need to care enough to look at it. Well, maybe you need some streak of independent thinking, as well. Trump still probably has the power to make the AI nightmare go away, if he decides to. It’s hard to know how long that will last, though. There’s a turning point after which the US government can no longer rein in the AI companies.

I often tell people “the future is not written”, and I think it’s hard for that lesson to really sink in. I’ve personally experienced a few miracle comebacks in my days. I’d practically given up on Yoshua Bengio ever becoming seriously worried about AI x-risk after arguing about it for years. Now he is. I asked him what I could’ve done to convince him earlier. He said: talk to him more.

There was a comment I wanted to make during the event that I wasn’t able to in the end. Sanders asked what lessons we can draw from history. My answer was: keep talking.

I don’t think of China as “the enemy”. The China hawk rhetoric reminds me of the build-up to the Iraq war. I’m not saying China is some sort of friendly fluffy teddy bear anymore than I would say that about Saddam Husein. But they are also not a cartoon mustachioed villain. Treating them as such is just silly. But anyways, even if you do view China as the mortal enemy of the United States, we should keep talking.

I’m often reminded of a comment a foreign colleague made in defense of what you might call “free speech” during discussions about what you might call “wokeness”. To summarize and paraphrase, they basically said: “You need to keep talking. Even with your most bitter enemies. I’m from a country where we’ve experienced intense violence and civil war. There are people on both sides whose families have been tortured and murdered. In my country, we recognize that we need to talk to each other, so that doesn’t happen again”.

If there was ever a time to set aside our differences and work together, this is it.

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