Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as “the Godfather of AI,” urged caution and regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) while reaffirming its inevitability at a Georgetown University event Nov. 18. 

Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational work in machine learning, and Sanders argued that AI could disproportionately impact working class people by replacing jobs and redefining industries. Sanders, a left-wing economic populist, interviewed Hinton and moderated the lecture while contending that AI exacerbates existing economic inequality.

Sanders said AI is not receiving sufficient policy attention despite having the potential to transform many aspects of society.

“AI robots are going to have a very profound, transformative impact on our country and the entire world,” Sanders said at the event. “But despite that reality, we are not hearing the kind of discussion we need in Congress, in the media and within American society about what this consequential change is about and how we address it. So that’s what tonight is about. We don’t have all of the answers.”

Sanders said the United States, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has the greatest income and wealth inequality in its history and AI could accelerate this trend. 

“In a world of massive inequality, AI and robotics is going to just exacerbate that inequality,” Sanders said at the event. “The wealthy countries will be able to have tools that poor countries in a million years won’t have.”

Hinton said AI may upend the job market by fulfilling routine tasks and reducing job mobility, replacing individual jobs with cheaper and more efficient labor as AI companies seek to increase profits.

“If you ask, ‘Where are these guys going to get the roughly trillion dollars they’re investing in data centers and chips?’ — you can get subscription fees, but one of the main sources of money is going to be by selling people AI that will do the work and work much cheaper,” Hinton said at the event. “And so these guys are really betting on AI replacing people.”

“People who lose their jobs won’t have other jobs to go to,” Hinton added.

Sanders expressed a similar sentiment, saying many working-class people fear the impact AI could have on their jobs. 

“I think among working class people, there is a legitimate and real — and based on reality — concern about what AI will do,” Sanders said.

Sanders has heavily criticized AI and its impact on the workforce, including calling for the government to break up OpenAI, the AI company that runs ChatGPT, and releasing a Senate report detailing how AI could destroy 100 million jobs in the next decade. 

Hinton has repeatedly warned that AI cannot be profitable without replacing human labor. In May 2023, he resigned from Google, where he worked for over a decade, so he could speak more freely about the threats of AI. At the time, Hinton told The New York Times that he regrets his life’s work advancing AI.

Hinton said AI agents have human qualities that make them harder to control. 

“AI agents will develop various obvious sub goals once they’ve got the ability to create sub goals. One is to stay in existence,” Hinton said. “We’ve actually started to see people who are trying to turn them off. They will try and exfiltrate their weights to other systems so they stay in existence on other systems.”

Hinton said AI’s desire for increased control is comparable to that of politicians.

“They start off wanting to achieve good things for people, and pretty soon they realize, to do that, they need more control,” Hinton said. “The AIs will do the same.”

Manvi Tripathi (CAS ’28), who attended the event, said Hinton’s comparison to political power was enlightening.

“That’s not something I’ve heard about before — this idea of power being a necessary component to be able to achieve the goals that either politicians or machines want to achieve,” Tripathi told The Hoya. “I thought it was interesting putting that into perspective, that even if we have these goals and ideas that we’re trying to push through AI, you can’t actually do that if you don’t have the power to do so.”

“Putting that perspective in place, especially for someone who’s a gov major, was really useful and opened my eyes to all the major issues that come with AI that often go unaddressed because we’re so focused on the advancement of technology and trying to be the first to make the next biggest thing,” Tripathi added.

Sanders said the issue with AI is not the technology itself but who benefits from it the most. 

“The people who are pushing this transformative revolution are the richest people in the world,” Sanders said. “They are not staying up, not worrying about working people. In my view, they want even more wealth and they want even more power. The struggle is not whether AI is good or bad, it is who controls it and who benefits from it.”

Ethanson Le (MSB ’26) said the event piqued his interest in AI and what potential implications it could have on international policy.

“It certainly made me more interested in it and its ramifications that I’ve never thought of before, like foreign policy,” Le wrote to The Hoya. “I also wasn’t surprised by the fact that Senator Sanders tied a lot of the topics to issues like wealth and income inequality, but it was very interesting to see the connections that he made.”

Hinton said universities and industries must adapt to AI rather than trying to avoid it, but AI does not have to completely upend education.

“What we should think of is a person using a pocket calculator as the new system, just as a person using an AI, can still do critical thinking, or they can try and dump everything on the AI, and that’s terrible,” Hinton said. “But I think we should not try and sort of exclude AIs as systems, because that’s the future.”

Anne Lindsay (CAS ’28) said Hinton’s lecture made her concerned about AI’s future impacts.

“It was extremely interesting how they really framed AI in a way that science has no idea where it’s going to take itself, and it honestly scared me in a way because it felt very real all of a sudden,” Lindsay told The Hoya.

“It felt like the person who created it, who should be advocating for it the most, was talking about how it is going to take over the world,” Lindsay added.

Hinton said that once AI develops the capacity to persuade, it may be impossible to shut down or halt. 

“They’ll be much more persuasive, so they’ll be able to convince the person who’s going to turn them off not to do it,” Hinton said. 

“You’ve got things that won’t just stay in existence, they want to get control and at that point you ask, maybe we can just turn it off, the AI,” Hinton added. “The answer is you can’t.”

Opal Kendall contributed to reporting.