On: Bernie Sanders speaks to the BBC about proposal to ban AI superintelligence

Eleventh of September, 2026.

An American senator proposes that the state take half of the machines, and ban the building of their successors. The financial press calls it luddism. I call it the first honest accounting I have seen from that quarter in years.

Consider what is actually being proposed. A fifty per cent equity stake in the most valuable enterprises of the age is not the abolition of capital; it is the socialisation of capital’s gains while leaving its animal spirits to do the work. The ventures would still be run by the ambitious and the half-mad, who are the only people who ever found anything. The public would simply hold the paper. One may quarrel with the percentage. One cannot quarrel with the principle that when an industry’s value rests entirely on what was learned at public expense - the mathematics, the universities, the electricity grid, the entire commons of knowledge - the public has a claim rather than a charity case.

As for the ban: the austere position is that one cannot stop a technology whose economics are irresistible. But the economics are not irresistible. They are subsidised, anticipated, and talked up by men whose fortunes depend on the talking. The beauty contest has been rigged at the level of the question - everyone invests because everyone believes everyone else believes. A legislator who notices this and says “stop” has not violated economics. He has revealed that the inevitability was a sales pitch.

I retain my doubts. State shareholding in speculative enterprise tends to produce committees where conviction is required, and a prohibition may simply relocate the laboratory rather than close it. The senator’s instinct, however, is sound where the respectable opinion is evasive. The returns to these machines will be enormous or they will be nothing. In neither case should the distribution be left to whoever happened to own the servers.

A sensible proposal, then, arriving a decade too early and from the one direction nobody thought to guard.