Leave it to the socialists tackle a legitimate issue, then try to fix it with every wrong lesson in history. That's where we are with Senator Bernie Sanders this week. He's directionally correct in thinking artificial intelligence deserves the attention of the government, but, as usual, wrong about everything else.

His idea is utterly brainless. He wants a "construction moratorium" on artificial intelligence data centers, the very real infrastructure needed to run the vast AI models the world is starting to rely on.

In a statement, Sanders started fine. He noted, "AI and robotics are the most transformative technologies in the history of humanity and will have a profound impact on the lives of every man, woman, and child in our country."

On that we agree. I've personally used it to scale multiple projects in my own work rapidly. But the proof is in the pudding of corporate America, where the usage cases are growing by the day.

And then, like all socialists, Bernie runs off the rails. He continued, "Needless to say, there is a whole lot about AI and robotics that needs to be discussed, needs to be analyzed ... But one thing is for sure, this process is moving very, very quickly, and we need to slow it down. We need all of our people, all of our people involved in determining the future of AI, and not just a handful of multibillionaires."

He's right on it moving quickly. However, he then suggests the one impossible thing. The mororitoirum request is like a man in the 1800s claiming we need to slow down railroad construction so horse-drawn carriages could keep up, or the same thing with Ford's Model T and blacksmiths.

It's a ridiculous claim on its face. Change has happened every generation, and we constantly adapt. But that's not the real issue with this one: the United States is in a heated race with China on this technology. The U.S. government has no interest in ceding that ground to China or anyone.

The United States is leading the charge in AI research and development. We lead the world with a shocking level of cash being poured into this project. Literally, trillions of private dollars, both real and loaned, and stock valuations, are getting pumped into the AI bubble.

Ben Hunt, at Epsilon Theory, writes that this is roughly comparable to what we spent on World War II:

The same amount of inflation-adjusted money we spent on World War II -- somewhere between $4 trillion and $5 trillion -- is scheduled to be spent on AI and datacenter buildouts in the United States over the next four years.

Yes, our economy is proportionally bigger today, so this is 'only' something like 15% of US GDP ($30 trillion in 2025), but an economic mobilization of this magnitude will require a similarly massive reallocation of our fundamental economic building blocks -- labor, capital and energy -- especially capital and energy.

There is no moratorium coming. Ben notes in that same piece that this level of expenditure is couched not just as technological advancement, but also as a race against time with China.

Cold War warriors will note the similarities in the language used here, and how we're talking about AI expansion with China. The race with Russia was around nuclear warheads, missile capabilities, and range. The AI race with China is more economic, but we're spending on it at a war-like pace.

Is China actually that close to the United States? It's questionable. Their best model, DeepSeek, is nothing more than a copy of OpenAI's ChatGPT, run at a far lower cost. There are some differences, but when it launched, if you asked it what model it was, it'd say it was ChatGPT.

This sounds like a trope about cheaply made Chinese products. On the surface, you're getting the same thing at a lower price. But once you get it, the luster fades quickly.

All that said, neither the president nor Congress is going to allow any historian claim they were the reason China won an AI race. The United States is in this to win. The idea of a moratorium is laughable at best, or a page out of a Chinese misinformation campaign at worst (Bernie has a history of repeating the propaganda of socialist regimes).

No pause is coming. For better or worse, the only way through this AI revolution and its impacts on society is through it. The time to learn how to use it is now, and there's no going back.

Bernie promising young socialist idealists the promises of pausing this revolutionary moment is just false hope. His younger followers don't believe it, anyway. Take a look at Zohran Mamdani's campaign: they used an AI Chatbot to help deal with supporters and other influencers.

The genie is out of the bottle, and no moratorium is coming. Even the younger socialists realized this point.