The Only Thing Capable of Uniting Bernie and Bannon

I f there was any question over whether the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is still operative in Washington’s hyper-partisan political environment, the answer may be found in the budding coalition of progressives and MAGA-friendly activists who have united in recent days to speak out against artificial intelligence.

Which is how Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon found themselves speaking on the same stage today.

With warnings that the technology could cause mass economic displacement and even human extinction, political figures who once wanted nothing to do with one another are suddenly joining forces, scrambling the political landscape just weeks before the midterm elections.

The odd couples, who would have been hard to fathom just weeks ago, are also reshaping the legislative agenda.

Republican Senators Ted Cruz and John Thune have teamed up with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar on an AI-safety bill; progressive Senator Richard Blumenthal joined forces with conservative Senator Josh Hawley to push a bill requiring AI companies to obtain approval from the Department of Energy before deploying new systems.

Nearly a decade ago, Sanders urged then-President-Elect Trump to reverse his decision to hire Bannon, a pugilistic architect of the MAGA movement, and called him “a racist individual.” Last year, Bannon called Sanders a “pussy” for not going after Hillary Clinton hard enough in 2016.

But the two were able to put all of that aside today to deliver the same message: If AI has the potential to wipe out humanity, Americans should have a say in how it operates. [ Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy ] “If the lives of every man, woman, and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs,” Sanders said at the all-day “Pro-Human Assembly.” Bannon sounded pretty much exactly the same.

“The American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs anymore,” the MAGA strategist said in what easily could have been a continuation of the Vermont socialist’s remarks.

“We can’t do it.” Standing decidedly outside of this spirit of cross-party cooperation is Trump, who has downplayed warnings about AI’s risks and called the concerns over the rapidly advancing technology a “hoax.” Trump made a surprise appearance at an AI-friendly event yesterday by placing a phone call to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and making clear that he does not believe the doomsday warnings that have circulated in recent days.

“The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” he told Huang, who took the call while speaking at a summit in Los Angeles and put it on speakerphone for the crowd to hear.