Bernie Sanders is trying to force a choice before it is too late. Let artificial intelligence deepen inequality and militarize the planet, or harness it to rewrite the social contract itself. His Thirty Two Hour Workweek Act is more than a labor proposal. It is a line drawn in the sand over who owns the gains of automation. Either workers trade rising productivity for time, dignity, and economic stability, or those gains continue to flow upward into the hands of a tiny class of tech titans who already hold unprecedented power.
For Sanders, the logic is simple. If machines are doing more of the work, people should not be working more hours just to survive. Productivity has surged for decades, yet wages and leisure have not kept pace. The traditional forty hour workweek was built for an industrial economy that demanded long shifts of manual labor. Artificial intelligence now threatens to make that model obsolete while preserving its burdens. Sanders argues that if society allows technology to replace jobs without restructuring how work and income are distributed, then mass insecurity will become the permanent condition of the modern worker.
The workweek proposal reframes automation as an opportunity instead of a threat. Instead of layoffs and burnout, automation could mean shorter hours with no loss of pay. It could mean parents with more time at home, healthier workers, and communities less dominated by exhaustion. But that outcome only becomes possible if the profits generated by automation are shared rather than hoarded. In that sense, the bill is not simply about labor policy. It is about ownership, power, and whether technology serves the public or concentrates authority even further.
At the same time, Sanders’ fear of robotic soldiers and mass job displacement exposes a growing moral vacuum in how artificial intelligence is being deployed. Military investments in autonomous weapons accelerate while civilian protections lag behind. Algorithms already shape hiring, policing, and surveillance with little transparency or accountability. Sanders warns that if machines fight wars and replace labor at scale, political leaders could wage conflict and restructure economies without public consent or shared sacrifice. The human cost becomes abstract. The barriers to catastrophic decisions grow dangerously thin.