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Terminally Ill Former GOP Senator Has Parting Warning About Dangers Of AI

[Screenshot/YouTube: 60 Minutes]

Former Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse warned of the dangers artificial intelligence (AI) will bring to the younger generations in a Sunday interview.

Sasse, who is dying from stage 4 pancreatic cancer, said on “60 Minutes” that scarcity will hardly be a concern with AI, which will allow for more access to things that are higher quality and cheaper. However, he argued that its efficiency could create a crisis for Americans as they try to find value in their lives.

“We’ve never lived in a world where 22-year-olds couldn’t assume that the work they did, they would be able to do until death or retirement, and we’re never gonna have that world again,” Sasse continued. “Everybody is going to have the experience of being 35, 40, 45 [or] 50, and have to figure out how to add value in the world again. And we’ve never had a civilization of lifelong learners, and we need to build it right now.”

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Sasse added that AI will be a mix of both Heaven and Hell for Americans.

“Question one, two or three after I speak is do you think AI is going to bring Heaven or is AI going to bring Hell? And the right answer is yes, it’s gonna bring both because what the digital revolution does is it accelerates almost everything about the human experience,” Sasse said. “Anything that can be reduced to a series of steps, which is most economic activity, it’s gonna be routinized and become really, really cheap really fast and became really ubiquitous. And so we’re gonna drive the cost of quantification almost all the way to zero or so close to zero that we won’t bother metering it anymore.”

Anthropic recently admitted that its new AI model defied security parameters and bragged to a researcher about it during his lunch break. The company also warned that its new system would increase the likelihood of massive cyberattacks in 2026.

AI data center construction has caused widespread backlash from citizens across the U.S., including in Port Washington, Wisconsin, where residents voted to crackdown on data center developments.

Sasse announced his cancer diagnosis in December and has lived longer than expected due to Revolution Medicine’s daraxonrasib, which he referred to as a “miracle drug.” Doctors initially gave Sasse three or four months to live.

After serving eight years in Congress, Sasse resigned in January 2023 to become the president of the University of Florida. He was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial regarding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.