Senator Mark Warner: Nobody’s Ready for What AI Could Do To Us

0:00Big Technology Podcast Host:If AI progress is actually moving on an exponential, are we ready? Let's talk about it with U.S. Senator Mark Warner right after this. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

0:41Big Technology Podcast Host:Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. U.S. Senator Mark Warner is here with us. We're going to talk about whether the government is ready for fast AI progress, us what government data says about AI-driven job loss so far, and the latest on that small anthropic situation with the Pentagon. Senator Warner, great to see you again. Welcome to the show. Alex, thanks so much for having me. So it's been four years since we last spoke, and I reached out because I had been getting freaked out, I'll be honest.

1:16Big Technology Podcast Host:I'd been speaking with some folks in and around these AI labs, and there's a belief among them that AI technology is moving on an exponential and could have real disruptions. And I think for me and many others who've been watching this, that was marketing language a couple of months ago. But now there's at least a percentage chance that that's real. And I'm freaked out because I'm not sure if the government is ready for an exponential. Silicon Valley might do exponentials. Washington does linear or backwards sometimes. I wanted to just get your take on, I know you're right into this. Everybody says, you know, go to speak to Senator Warner.

1:54Big Technology Podcast Host:He's the one that knows what's going on. But I want to get your take on the general vibe in Washington today. Do you think there's awareness among rank and file members of Congress and the Senate that something might be brewing, that there will have to be drastic action to head off the negative consequences if it happens? Well, Alex, I don't think government's ready. i don't think society's ready and i know the same you know ai optimists who are talking about this i actually think they have changed their pitch and are now holding back because they're freaked out about freaking out people and i've seen like you know the um and i am still long ai in terms of value but boy short term next three to five years the economic disruption is gonna be i i just think we are not ready at all we don't have good data we don't know what's happening and you know an example i like to give is if you just look at anthropics clod products this year how clod has already kind of disrupted the whole software business now the market recovered a little bit But then it hit the same thing on the HR business.

3:14The markets don't respond that way that quickly if people aren't saying there's going to be fundamentally dramatic change in kind of industry fundamentals. And that's just two areas. And I think there's much, much more to come.

3:30Big Technology Podcast Host:So I've heard you say this a couple of times that the CEOs may be downplaying the impact. I know they speak with you privately. Are they telling you things like saying, hey, Senator Warner, don't say this to other people, but here's what we think. Or what brings you to that assessment? What brings me is the CEOs who are saying this in the AI space. and what I'm hearing privately from big brand name firms who are saying they're cutting off or cutting in half the number of interns or first year hires. I even heard from a nationally known law firm that has decided to hire no first year associates.

4:11They're going to take a pause and see how this works out before they even hire. All these kids, after they've done everything to get through law school and they got a job offer they thought with a big brand firm and then it's just going away nothing they did and because of ai and yeah because ai and i hear and i hear like so many companies that are mid-sized who say you know i had one guy the other day saying you know i had 23 people do this back office function now i got three isn't that amazing and the thing is we are not even collecting data on this yet. That's why I've got a bill with Josh Hotley, very bipartisan, that says to BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, we need to start measuring this.

4:56And not just in terms of firms like a Jack Dorsey saying he's cutting 40 % of his staff on because of AI and whether that's true or not, you know, we won't know for sure, but, you know, that kind, but also try to measure, you know, jobs that would traditionally have been created, because my view is that this is going to particularly hit kids coming out of college, coming out of graduate school. We're at about 9 % recent college graduate unemployment. I think that number will actually go to 30%. And the economic disruption that will have not only on those young people that don't get jobs, but their parents who help finance their college education and the level of kind of fear that is amongst everybody I know that's in college at this point, I don't think people are factoring that in.

5:40And to say government's not ready would be an understatement. Right.

5:45Big Technology Podcast Host:And we're going to talk about some legislation that you have brewing and, and, you know, but it takes more than one or two senators here. And, you know, you've already passed the Claude test, Senator Lorne, which is you're a senator that knows what Claude is. 100 U.S. senators. How many of them do you think know what Claude is? Well, I hope, I hope more than you and I think. But, you know, and again, I don't if you want to go now into the whole you know clad's part of anthropic um whether we want to go down that path now but you know i would argue that anthropic you know pick your anthropic open ai obviously google is doing doing well we've got a half dozen llms that are making major advances but you know what what's happening to anthropic at this point as they were doing business with the Defense Department and being very well used.

6:35And, you know, the anthropic leadership crosswise with Hegseth at DOD, and obviously any company, if they're going to do business with DOD, has to make some accommodation. But the idea that we're going to turn over to Pete Hegseth, the ability to completely decide that these AI tools can be used totally for surveillance without any guardrails, or even potentially worse, creating AI weapons without a human in the loop. That's big freaking deal. And we ought to have, if we were not in this war with Iran at this point, I think that would have been a major focus. And what is even happening with this, I'm trying to rally the tech community to say, regardless of what you feel about Trump and Hegsef, if you're having these decisions and then Hegsef is going to declare, is trying to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk, that would mean that not only Anthropic couldn't do business with DoD, but any company and virtually every major company in America does some level of business with DoD, they couldn't do business with Anthropic as well.

7:39This would be the ability for a single individual to write a death sentence to major American tech companies. And people need to realize this stuff is happening real time.

7:50Big Technology Podcast Host:Okay, so I guess like the reason why I'm asking the awareness. And I take your point. We're going to talk a little bit more about this in the second half, about the Anthropic DOD or the war, the dispute they're having with the Department of Defense, Department of War, whatever you want to call it. We'll talk about that a bit more. The reason why I asked is because, and maybe this dispute is giving more awareness to Anthropic. I just want to see if you could reassure me, or maybe you're saying that there is little reassurance that when it comes to the list of priorities that your your colleagues have that this at least ranks because i i remember reporting on the social media stuff uh five ten years ago it was clear that there was no there was and you know what i guess we sort of came out of it okay well alex but we did this is my worry is this say there's the same lack of awareness in the government for something that could happen faster.

8:48Well, amen. Amen. Like social media was a challenge. And I had bipartisan bills on data portability, interoperability, delegability, which is now basically called agentic AI. We had things about dark patterns. There was lots of bipartisan action. And all the social media companies, they all said, yeah, we want some meaningful regulation until you put words on the page. And we batted zero. We still haven't even done the freaking kids' online safety bills. So social media is a challenge. It has, I think, effects, you know, psychic effects, psychological effects, I'm sorry, on young people. But it is tiny compared to AI.

9:30When we think about, you know, the stories already we're hearing about AI, you know, leading kids potentially to suicide. And we're seeing what was kind of a spot story just six months ago of people becoming romantically involved with um ai agents now this is actually a statistical thing you can look at um and that's just on the kind of psychological societal effects but on the job effects we just don't have we don't have good data we have people i think shifting blame i've you know i saw amazon you know they've announced 11 000 job losses they say none of that's due to AI. But I got to just tell you, you wouldn't have literally not billions, but trillions of dollars of private capital coming in if these enterprises don't, the investors don't think they're going to return.

10:21Now, some of this may be because we're going to have great healthcare breakthroughs or have AI created jobs, which I believe we will. But in the short term, the amount of AI job dislocation is going to be jaw dropping. And I don't think the majority of senators understand and i think they can be convinced um and i just fear that we what we've got now is you know the overriding uh agenda coming out of the trump administration is they are kind of ai accelerators you know peddled in the metal because we got to beat china and we do have to beat china but the idea that we are not going to think about any guardrails or about the short-term economic consequences i think is really frightening and and as somebody who still believes the power of by the way there's no way we're putting the genie back in the bottle anyway is could have positive effects we could actually have populism on the left and the right coming together to try to you know snuff out the innovation and do it ham-handedly so boy boy this is you know it is i'm trying to get hired one last time in this job and probably the major reason is if i can help navigate um you know some of these ai solutions and i don't pretend to have by any means all the answers matter of fact if we i think alex we may have talked about this at one point we go way back in time like three years ago the i think well at least at that point thought through well guarantee of a job was let's at least make sure everybody has basic coding skills that was well intentioned but was obviously not the right answer since those are the first jobs being eliminated

12:04Big Technology Podcast Host:and so when you think about the way that your colleagues view this uh is it high priority medium priority or low priority for them wasn't this stuff is hard i i don't you know i i joke but it's kind of true there is no real linear relationship between me spending more time I'm on AI and actually thinking I have a better understanding. I get – it is evolving so quickly. I think most members – and this is a human reaction. If you don't get it and it seems too complicated, you want to try to punt on that. And that allows for simple-minded solutions like let's just shut it down or let's just have a moratorium all data centers for a year.

12:52That's not going to answer the question. So we do have to navigate it. And what small value I hope I can add is not turning this into a partisan issue and trying to find folks on both sides of the aisle that says, hey, we've got to grapple with this. China and the rest of the world is moving ahead. There is no way we can reverse this. But we are not powerless, both to put guardrails in effect and also say in terms of the economic dislocation. And my challenge to the AI community is you guys are right. If government defines us all, we'll probably screw it up. So you guys help us define what this transition looks like, what the training or reskilling, whatever tool we want to call it.

13:35But you also got to help pay for it because the cost of this are going to be amazing.

13:40Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, and I'll explain a little bit about my line of questioning here. I just wanted to see if you think the government would be able to move fast if we end up seeing this exponential. I'll even take your words. You said recently in a great YouTube video about the AI challenge, this is as dramatic as it changes anything I've seen in my lifetime. You said, think about the transformation brought by the Internet. this AI transformation at the rate we're seeing it could be over in the next two to three years and again I know you have legislation you have three bills at least three bills in action right now on AI gathering data trying to understand the implications here trying to head off the issue and it's different you can attack it in a way that it's not stop it it's like maybe help people who are being who are who are in at risk of job dislocation but i'm not very reassured hearing the way that you describe the way that this issue is being uh handled in the senate that that that speed is going to be met well i'm not sure i can point to a policy makers anywhere in the world that's figured this out i mean i got good bipartisan legislation let's put a commission together similar to the cyber salarium that actually put some points on the board you know commission of the economy of the future we've got you know bills to get bls to start reporting on ai job disruption i've got a bipartisan bill about how ai is going to affect the financial markets and how we ought to think through this they are i think thoughtful but they are self-acknowledging here small incremental steps when it very much could be the holy shit moment and can we think big and you know if if donald trump the disruptor if he had an ounce of either empathy or collaborative spirit somebody that is a disruptor could actually help us through this but i i i want to be more optimistic um but but i'm i am terrified i mean i had somebody come in the other day and it was like i thought it was a very uh interesting thing saying you get you know you get three couples of parents together who are talking about their kids yeah 10 years ago would have been you know this globalization i don't know if my kid's gonna get a job five years ago it'd be oh my gosh i'm really concerned about whether my kid is getting addicted to social media now the conversation and this is happening at such a level that our policymakers get it they are terrified that their kids have done everything right.

16:20They're going through college and there may not be a job there.

16:23Big Technology Podcast Host:Right. And can I just say, so I brought up social media as an example of our U.S. legislative body's ability to deal with technology effectively, but it's different than social media. I think we both agree here that with social media, the big disagreement was, are you going to tell Facebook how to handle its newsfeed, what to do? This isn't necessarily uh legislation that needs to be or policy that needs to be can we tell the ai companies to stop making their models to be able to handle the negative effects here it's more like how do you stimulate job growth retraining and even that's probably not proven but um that's what gives me hope is that there's a chance that that that can be and the fact that you have these bipartisan bills let's but let's look for a second solution you know i've talked to some of the my friends in the industry who say like let's at least deal with things like non-consensual nudes do you want your young daughter or son to be portrayed with a deep fake out there and everybody says yes but then you get you know elon at grok saying no we you know we're going to be an outlier and you know we default to the lowest common denominator on some of this you The idea of these horrific stories of people being guided to suicide.

17:43We can say, well, we're going to try to correct the model a little bit, but we're always lagging. I mean, I do think I'm kind of freaked out about this. The idea of who you turn your romantic interest to. I think we all remember that movie a few years back called, I think it was called Her, where the main character fell in love with a kind of a chatbot. But that stuff is happening now, not in tiny numbers, but is actually starting to appear statistically. And then we come to the job dislocation. The biggest – in most kind of mid-tier public universities, the number one major for most young people is business or business administration.

18:26Those are the jobs that you come out and you go work for a firm for a couple of years as a young analyst or whatever. Those jobs are gone. I mean, somebody suggested the other day, I'm not sure this is right, but maybe some of these companies ought to pay an incentive to get more people into nursing as opposed to business administration. We ought to at least disclose to people that the job prospects in some of these fields are going to dramatically change. And I'm just not sure whether we're ready. And one of the scary things that I've found, and again, I want to be more optimistic, is like you talk to the leading AI companies, the leading AI thinkers, and they'll give you a partial answer.

19:10Well, gosh, we're going to build a lot of data centers so that the traditional trades will have an increase. And that will be a short-term increase in terms of building those facilities. And there's going to be obviously huge needs for more electrons. So I'm a big advocate that we'll never be able to power this without a small modular nuclear or other kind of decentralized power generation. But that's still going to be a relatively small number. And then you say, well, how do we make sure that whatever you're going to do, you can use AI to become better skilled at it? And everybody's kind of got soft terms because they're making up right now.

19:49But gosh, we got to have that stuff ready yesterday. and it'll be very interesting to see even this hiring cycle as we get close to graduation in May in colleges. It's going to be very telling. Yeah, it's going to be very telling.

20:05Big Technology Podcast Host:New grads get jobs. We're going to learn very quickly. I'll say a couple of things. First of all, as someone who's married to a nurse, I agree with you. It's a good career path and I always tell her at least one of us will be employed in the long term. On AI romantic relationships, I mean, you can't possibly believe that adults should not be able to enter into these relationships with AI chatbots. Is that more of a minor thing that you would – in terms of legislation, right? I don't know. I mean, obviously on minors and, you know, you – and trust me, I'm not, you know, big brother here in saying we can prohibit behavior of adults.

20:49but you know at at some point you know as a functioning society that needs to procreate that needs to have human relations i just think we ought to have a at least a discussion about this and i i just think that my friends in the community need to either not blow it off and say oh we can't well there's nothing we can do or you know at least we put a bigger warning sign you know adults are going to do what they're going to do but the the full fully informed before you go down some of these rabbit holes um you know and and the ability to have any kind of shared common truth as we think about how ai could affect you know political debate i am terrified right now of of um you know disruptions in our 26th election from foreign sources or frankly even you know the president's willingness to try to say he wants to have the feds take over our elections and we have not seen deep fakes used in a massive way so far but as we know that technology is evolving on a monthly basis and it only takes one major screw-up in a election cycle for example for people who already are losing faith to lose faith in our basic democratic processes.

22:09Big Technology Podcast Host:Right. So you're running for a fourth term, three-term senator at this point. And one of the things that I love when I speak with politicians is we can talk about polling and no one reads polls better than people like yourself. So I want to read to you a couple polls about AI's popularity or lack thereof and sort of get your read on what it could mean politically. This is from the NBC News poll. You might've seen it. A majority of registered voters, 57 % said they believe that the risks of AI outweigh the benefits and a plurality of voters view AI negatively and don't believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology.

22:51Big Technology Podcast Host:I guess let's leave the reaction to Democrats and Republicans aside for a moment. What are the consequences? And we've tried to figure this out on the show, but no one better to speak about it than with you. What are the consequences for this ai industry if it continues to pull so low uh is there are they opening themselves up to put a go they're opening themselves up i think the first line will be the war against data centers you know and they are big they use a lot of power you know and that becomes almost a proxy for the overall concerns about ai at large and you know they're gonna have to go ahead and make sure that people's electric bills don't go up that the water supplies don't go up that they are better that they are better screened you know i got a county in in virginia that took their ai revenues and put it all into affordable housing so people see a tangible benefit and in virginia we're on the front line we're data center you know uh heaven in terms of the biggest state biggest data centers in the u.s we're having a major debate right now at the state level about trying to extract you know somewhere between 500 million and a billion dollars a year from the industry i would hope the industry would lean into some of these things and say we're going to yes we will voluntarily help and we will dedicate that to this economic transition you know it's happening so quickly i'm not sure we're going to get that together and i'm no longer the governor or the state official but the industry the the tech industry writ large has basically said and i say this is a pro-tech guy i'm you know and my back business background was tech i'm a big believer but the tech industry so far has generally said you know and likely so policymakers don't get us we can blow them off you know that was clearly the success of the social media platforms to never have any regulatory basis at all and then when you do have over regulation say from the eu and they'll point to the eu and say listen we don't want to be like europeans they have no innovation at all so getting it right is hard but on this one um you know when i this one if they kind of ignore and say we can blow off any regulatory or any framework we have no obligation um i think it could bite them now it's not going to disappear ai these models are out there and the fact that you know you know in China clearly is investing at an amazing rate.

25:23But even if America closed down, the models can transfer to another entity that has the compute power. So this is not going away in a certain way, not to sound old school wistful. But if there was ever a time where the world as a whole ought to be thinking through this rather than nation state competition, it is on this issue. And I absolutely do believe that we are now, whether it's full AGI or full process, we're getting close to where the magic that happens inside these models. I don't think, at least I've heard from many of – and most of the guys have said, like, we don't really understand how this is – what all is happening.

26:09This is way beyond just predictive of the next word, which was kind of the AI 101 model that people got educated on a long, long time ago, like two years ago.

26:20Big Technology Podcast Host:Okay, let me run this by you before we end this segment because you mentioned the data centers. I was stunned. So there was a series of negative polls about AI that came out recently, and I was stunned at the way people feel about data centers. So this is from Pew. I'm sure you've seen this poll. Far more Americans say data centers are mostly bad than good for the environment at 39 % to 4%, for home energy costs at 38 % to 6%, and the quality of life for those that live nearby, 30 % to 6%. I mean, goodness, that is a terrible, terrible polling numbers for these data centers. Does that mean that they're going to be places where they are just not going to be built because the opposition is so high?

27:03Big Technology Podcast Host:I saw there was an Axios report that said something like half of the data centers that are expected to be built this year are delayed. Now, some of that is part shortages. But I think community opposition is going to be a big part of it. Well, the interesting thing, too, and rightfully some of the tech companies will say, well, you actually look at the electric rates for states that have done a lot of this. They've not seen a dramatic rise. But I think they have to do more than just say, hey, we're going to cover your no increase in utility and electric rates. I think they got to put that in statute.

27:36I think they got to move more towards self-generation that is adjacent to the AI facility so it doesn't go into the full grid. And I think we have to document that. I think they have to do more on the water usage. I think they need to do a much better job on just visual screening. These are big, ugly buildings. And the thing a little bit is they are making progress. But to go into a community and sell that when the only image you have is of, say, data centers in northern Virginia that are still old school, last generation, that's a hard sell. Now, there always will be a jurisdiction that needs that additional revenue to get by.

28:24And they do generate revenue and they don't bring a lot of kids because they don't have a lot of jobs adjacent. But there needs to be a rethinking on this. And I do think the state battle that's going on in Virginia right now, I've said to the industry, you guys got to watch this because we are the mother load of data centers. And if there is some adjustment of the kind of economic deal that's going to happen in Virginia, that is going to be copied by every other state around the country. And my pitch to the AI industry is, you know, don't just fight it like mad. Be proactive and say, yes, we're going to chip in more.

29:06and we're going to chip in more and not only make sure your electric rates don't go up and they are appropriately shielded but we're going to actually put money on the table to help through this economic transition and i you know i get a lot of head nods but you know the the lack of of specific policy ideas alex is i've talked to everybody i i i can and most you know policy experts and others are observing the problem or want to do things like, I'm trying to collect data, but what the actual reskilling, retraining program looks like, we don't have a lot of good examples so far.

29:46Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, I'm sensing some frustration with tech companies. Yeah. I mean, I kind of get it. If you think about the big guys, they've been pounded on for years. Since most of the big guys act, the hyperscalers, Most of them actually started as either social media or you got Amazon and Microsoft and some of those. But they've kind of gotten through with kind of good lip service but no rules or regulations in place. And it's kind of like this time, I think the seriousness and back to your numbers on data centers, the fear is real and palatable. and I don't want this innovation to stop, but I do think sitting down and figuring this out in a more forward-leaning way is really essential.

30:42And that's what I'm desperately trying to do here. And this job, at least, is not allow this to be kind of divided Ds versus Rs.

30:49Big Technology Podcast Host:All right, let's take a quick break and then come back and talk a little bit more about Anthropic and the Pentagon and the state of AI in warfare. Back right after this. I've interviewed a lot of great tech founders on this show. And one surprisingly universal challenge comes up again and again, finding the right domain name. It's something I ran into myself when launching big technology. The names you want are often taken, and it's tempting just to settle and move on. But the founders I respect most don't settle on fundamentals, and your name is one of them. It should immediately signal what you actually built.