Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Abdul El-Sayed says his plan to regulate artificial intelligence is resonating with young voters, who he says will have to live the longest with the wide-reaching impacts the technology could have.
Hundreds of Michigan State University students attended a town hall Friday with El-Sayed at the MSU Union. Even after the room was at capacity, a line continued to stretch around the perimeter of the second floor, down two sets of staircases and into the first floor.
When the students were asked to raise their hands if they were concerned AI would make it harder to get a good-paying job, nearly the entire room did.
“The thing that used to keep me up at night was that people don’t get healthcare,” El-Sayed said. “That still keeps me up at night, but to me, the big existential risk of our moment is AI.”
He said the technology is not inherently bad, but there should be guardrails and close monitoring of how it is used, saying it shouldn’t be able to make employment or healthcare decisions or have the ability to fire a weapon.
“When a few corporations dominate the creation of a technology with this much capacity, moving this fast, that is extremely risky,” El-Sayed said.
El-Sayed said he faced a tough job market when he graduated in 2007, but it was only because the economy was temporarily at a low point.
“It wasn’t that there were structurally not jobs to be had,” El-Sayed said.
With artificial intelligence, he said that could be different for students graduating in the next few years.
“If the CEO of Anthropic is telling us that they’re going to take 50% of white collar jobs, the big question that is looming over your horizon is, like, ‘what the hell am I doing here anyways? Taking $60,000 in debt for a job that may not exist,’” El-Sayed said.
But El-Sayed said the impacts of artificial intelligence go beyond the economy, pointing to recent cybersecurity incidents in which agents being tested internally by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic went rogue, breaking out of their isolated testing sandbox and hacking multiple companies’ servers.
That’s why he said there needs to be a pause on developing frontier AI models until there are clear interpretability standards.
“The speed at which the technology is being created has far outpaced the speed at which we can keep it safe,” El-Sayed said.
He also said there should be a federal moratorium on data center development until federal regulations are implemented to minimize the impact on utility rates, increase reliability of utilities and ensure there are community benefits agreements negotiated with local communities that do want data centers.
Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Rogers has previously appeared to express support for a data center moratorium, saying “we need to take a pause, probably, and make sure we’re answering all the questions that people have.”
El-Sayed is calling to regulate AI firms similarly to public utilities, including partial public ownership and democratically elected or appointed board members.
Asked by a student whether the policy could create an incentive to propel AI development to increase funding for the government, El-Sayed said there would have to be a firewall ensuring that essential functions are not reliant on those funds.
He said that while some see AI development as a race with China, it’s in everyone’s best interest to slow development.
But he contrasted it with the 20th-century space race, saying that if AI development is going to be treated as a race, it needs to be a similar public project rather than being carried out by private corporations.
“If we're serious about winning the race, then fine,” El-Sayed said. “This should be done under democratic control, where all of us have a say, and at least our government, which is democratically elected, has the ability to make sure that it's being balanced against a lot of the other interests in public policy.”
El-Sayed said he was impressed with the depth of the policy questions students asked on topics like healthcare and housing.
“You know what I always get asked? Hasan Piker,” El-Sayed said. “All you in the press, you hear these folks are talking about healthcare. Stop asking me about a streamer in California.”
