Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned of two threats related to artificial intelligence: the development of the technology without limits, and the economic bubble around a select few companies.
The New York Democrat, who has proposed a ban on AI, shared her thoughts in an interview with MeidasTouch Network reporter Pablo Manriquez, who addressed AI companies signaling they would slow the development process.
“You’ve called for a moratorium on AI. Now AI companies seem to be saying that they want to slow it down, but there’s a lot of skepticism about whether or not they’re genuine or serious about, you know, their intentions. But what do you make of it?” asked Manriquez.
“I think two things can be true at once,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “One is understanding that AI technology can be very dangerous when pursued without any guardrails, and we can also acknowledge the financially upside-down position that a lot of these oligarchs are in.”
Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez believes an AI bubble is driving the American economy, driven by a limited number of companies.
“There is an AI bubble,” she said. “For the last year, if honestly over the last year, the entire U.S. economy and our positive performance can largely be attributed to seven AI companies that many believe whose stock prices are a bubble.”
The congresswoman also emphasized that she has been warning the public for several months that taxpayers should not pay for these evaluations if they fall.
“It’s been several months now that I have been sounding the alarm that the AI industry should not receive a government bailout, and I am very concerned that in this landscape of a potentially dangerous technology emerging we also have companies that are in a financially upside-down position where everyday people’s 401(k)s and pensions are invested and have open exposure to volatile, potentially volatile investments, and we could be seeing an economic bubble collide with a technological frontier,” she said.
Her concerns are focused on workers.
“So my primary concern in all of this is working-class people, their jobs, their retirements, their pensions, and protecting them from the gambling that San Francisco has been doing with people’s livelihoods,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Are AI companies too big to fail?”
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