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naomi klein
Naomi Klein, Bernie Sanders, and Ro Khanna Roundtable Explores Future of AI
"AI is the most far-reaching and pivotal technological revolution in the history of humanity," notes the Sanders Institute. "The choices we make now will determine whether those changes make the world better or worse."
Apr 14, 2026
“You know you're in trouble when you can't describe reality without sounding crazy.”
That's how renowned author and activist Naomi Klein described society's relationship with rapidly—some say dangerously—evolving artificial intelligence technology during a Tuesday livestreamed panel discussion with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) hosted by the Sanders Institute.
Khanna and Klein are both fellows at the institute, cofounded by Sanders' (I-Vt.) wife and son, Jane O'Meara Sanders and David Driscoll. The Sanders Institute over recent years has convened an array of conferences and events focused on bringing together the best minds, top experts, and policy advocates on a host of issues.
“This AI and robotics revolution is the most sweeping technological change that the world has ever seen,” said Sanders. “People talk about the changes that the Industrial Revolution brought, which were profound. This is going to move a lot faster, with a lot more impact.”
“This revolution is being pushed by the wealthiest people in the world,” Sanders continued. “We’re talking about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and other multi-multi-billionaires who are spending hundreds and hundreds if not trillions of dollars combined trying to do the research and the implementation for these technologies.”
Turning to Khanna and Klein, the senator asked: “What are the motives of these guys? Do the American people think that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are sitting up nights saying, ‘Wow, we got this technology, we're going to improve life for working people?’”
Klein contended that “their motives are exactly the opposite, and they're very blunt about this, that they are in a race to reach something that they call AGI—artificial general intelligence—or even something beyond that, superintelligence.”
While agreeing with Sanders that AI will prove as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, Klein underscored one big difference between the two.
“Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which created huge numbers of jobs, the goal of this revolution is to eliminate jobs,” the Shock Doctrine author explained. “They've been absolutely transparent about what they want to achieve, which is a jobs apocalypse. They want to be free from their workers."
"They really don't like it when their workers organize and push back, whether in unions or outside of unions," Klein added. "And I think that's part of the appeal of AI for these guys, is the idea that they could become trillionaires with virtually no employees.”
Khanna, a potential 2028 presidential candidate who authored the book Progressive Capitalism: How to Make Tech Work for All of Us, has been a leading voice in the US House of Representatives on the issue of AI. The congressman pointed out that tech titans are “using technology to eliminate workers and maximize their profits, and if you look at the Industrial Revolution, for 60 years, worker wages fell… even as Britain became wealthy."
"And so the question, in my view, for AI is, are we going to let a few billionaires, trillionaires, call the shots, or are we going to make sure that the technology is actually used in any way to enhance workers, to enhance total productivity?” he asked.
Sanders noted that Bezos, Amazon's founder, "wants to raise $100 billion to do what? To automate factories in America and around the world."
"You know what that means? It means there will no longer be manufacturing jobs in the United States or in warehouses," the senator added. "He wants to get rid of the 600,000 Amazon workers and replace them with robots. Elon Musk is converting Tesla partially to a robotics company. He wants to produce a million robots a year… What do you think a robot is there for? It's to replace a union worker.”
Klein said that “if we lived in a world that took care of people… [where] if a job was eliminated, people had a guaranteed income, they knew that they had healthcare, they knew that they weren't going to get evicted, we'd be having a different conversation.”
It may be more than just jobs that are eliminated if humanity does not proceed with utmost caution.
Sanders cited AI pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton who have warned that superintelligent artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity. According to Hinton and others, the senator explained, c“it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when [AI] will become smarter than human beings, and the fear of these guys, which used to be science fiction, is that AI will essentially establish its independence from human control in order to protect itself... raising the possibility of horrific things happening.”
Khanna agreed that such an outcome is “a real risk" as countries remove guardrails to breakneck AI development with the excuse that if they don't do it, their rivals will—the same dangerous thinking that fueled the Cold War nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union.
“I don't know whether it will happen or not, but why would we not take every precaution to make sure it doesn’t?” the congressman asked. “And this is what I don't understand, when people say, ‘Well, we want to compete with other nations and have a race to the bottom."
While the specter of an AI apocalypse is growing, it remains much more a reflection of human anxieties that any sort of impending threat. The same cannot be said for lethal autonomous weapon systems—better known as killer robots, which are defined as arms that can operate without any meaningful human control.
Activists like those at the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots have long sounded the alarm on the development of weapons that can operate without human control. However, Khanna said that human decision-making alone “is not enough.”
“If AI is doing all the data analysis and saying, OK, here's the target, and you just have a human being saying, OK, I'm the one who's going to give the order [to attack]… well, there's a human last-minute judgment,” he said. "What's happened is just a dependence on these machines."
As an example, Khanna pointed to what he said was the US military's use of AI that “gave the target of the school” in southern Iran where 168 children and staff were massacred in a February 28 cruise missile strike.
Sanders raised the possibility that a future in which robots largely replace humans on the battlefield “makes it easier” for countries with such technology to wage war.
However, Khanna countered that such conflicts are “deeply asymmetrical," meaning that they're only "easier" for the more technologically advanced side.
“The United States can have drones and technology, and Israel can do that,” the congressman said. “But the people who were killed in what I call the genocide in Gaza, 70,000 people, they don't have that technology. The starving people in Cuba, because of our fuel blockade, don't have that technology. The people in Iran who were killed don't have that technology."
"So you have one side of political leadership in our country that doesn't have to worry as much about deaths for our people," he contended. "But then there’s no… moral deliberation about the dignity and worth of people who were killed.”
While such life-and-death matters are far removed from the reality of most Americans’ lives, the panelists gave examples of how AI is impacting everyday citizens and their privacy.
“We heard reports from a lot of people on the ground who were standing up to ICE,” Klein said, referring to the nationwide protests and individual acts of resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration’s overall anti-immigrant blitz.
“They were having these very creepy experiences where ICE knew their names before they had said anything. They knew where they lived before they said anything," she added. "Scanning a face, scanning a license plate.”
Not everyone attends protests. But nearly everyone uses the internet and its accoutrements; most notably, social media. To that end, Khanna said that Big Tech isn’t just “taking our data, they’re trying to figure out what we think.”
“We've had no pushback to these companies,” he continued. “They have a profit motive to do this. They have a profit motive to get us as addictive to screen time as possible."
"They’re targeting young people… especially young girls that have had eating disorders... and suicidal thoughts because of the junk they've been fed," Khanna noted, calling the situation “a dereliction of Congress.”
“We have not passed any privacy legislation or restrictions really on social media companies as they've had total carte blanche to do what they want,” he said.
Sanders said that “to my mind, it is very clear why Congress is not dealing with this issue, and that is the power and the wealth of people who do not want us to deal with it.”
“To the best of my understanding, as of now, just for the 2026 elections, AI has already put $400 million into elections, and we've go… five to six more months to go,” he explained. “So let's assume that any candidate who gets up there and says, ‘You know, I have some real concerns about AI, let's slow it down, let's make it work for people rather than Elon Musk,’ that candidate will have billions of dollars thrown at him or her, which speaks to a corrupt campaign finance [system].”
Klein has similarly sounded the alarm about far-right tech oligarchs, including in a "must-read" essay with Astra Taylor about the fight against "end times fascism" published by The Guardian last year. The pair plans to release a related book in September.
“If we look at these Silicon Valley billionaires who lined up behind [President Donald] Trump during the election campaign… if you listen to what they have been saying about why they flipped, a lot of it was because there were some gentle regulations on crypto and AI during the Biden administration, including things like trying to figure out how to prevent AI from killing us all, and keeping it away from nuclear weapons," Klein said during Tuesday's panel. "Really sort of sensible policy… Apparently this was too much.”
While Congress fails to act, the people are stepping up.
“What we are seeing all over this country, from conservative areas, in progressive areas, [is] people saying, hey, thank you very much, we prefer not to have a data center in our community,” said Sanders—who recently introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)—pointing to one example of people-powered victories.
“So this is really an unprecedented grassroots revolt, not only against the data centers, but against this whole idea... of very, very wealthy people operating in a secretive mode, pushing through what they want against the needs of ordinary people,” he added.
Klein said that “we need to have a national and international conversation, because these are global technologies, about how we can use these very powerful tools to make our lives better, to enhance life, to have a human-first AI policy.”
“And that means that we look at it holistically,” she continued. “We figure out how we do it in the least resource-intensive way to have the best results. And then it isn't about turning a bunch of guys into trillionaires.”
“It's about what kind of society we want to live in, how we want to treat each other, how we want to protect the natural world,” Klein added. “I think we should be having town hall conversations about it, and we might find out that we have more in common with our neighbors than we thought."
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Progressive Champion Avi Lewis Wins Leadership Race for Canada’s NDP, Vowing Left Party Will Come ‘Roaring Back’
"The NDP will start winning again because we will become that beacon to the 99%," Lewis said.
Mar 30, 2026
Progressive activist Avi Lewis is pledging to bring Canada's New Democratic Party "out of the wilderness" after being decisively elected as its new leader on Sunday on the back of an ambitious, affordability-focused agenda aimed at winning back working-class voters.
Lewis, the grandson of one of the NDP's cofounders, cruised to a resounding victory, earning 56% of the vote to take over leadership of the long-ailing left-wing party, which has bled members in recent years to both Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberals and Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives.
He was introduced at Sunday's Winnipeg convention by his wife, the acclaimed author and activist Naomi Klein, who said her husband's victory was an invitation for Canadians to “dream big once again" and renew the fight against corporate greed at a time when more than half of the population says they struggle to afford basic necessities.
Lewis has proposed a sweeping agenda of “public options” aimed at combating Canada’s affordability crisis, including publicly owned grocery stores and banks to compete with price-gouging corporate monopolies.
A scion of the party that helped to build Canada’s universal healthcare system—which covers hospital and physician care—he’s called for it to be expanded into a “head-to-toe” care system that guarantees dental, drugs, vision, hearing, and mental health services for all Canadians.
In order to pay for these programs and others—including public housing, green energy investment, and subsidized phone and internet plans—Lewis has campaigned to pass a wealth tax on the richest 1% of Canadians, who own nearly $1.25 trillion, almost as much as the bottom 80% of Canadians, according to a recent report by Oxfam Canada.
"This country is awash in wealth. We can have nice things," Lewis asserted to a raucous crowd during his acceptance speech. "Banks made $70 billion in profits last year alone. Oil companies are expecting a new windfall in the tens of billions. Grocery baron Galen Weston alone is worth $20 billion."
During his campaign, Lewis railed against tax cuts for wealthy Canadians passed by the Liberal government, which are projected to cost the government nearly $76 billion over five years and slash an estimated 57,000 public-sector jobs by 2028.
"It is time, far past time, to properly tax the billionaires and corporations that have been riding a tidal wave of profit," Lewis said.
While he acknowledged that Carney is still largely popular in Canada, in large part due to his fiery denunciations of US President Donald Trump's tariff war and threats to annex Canada, Lewis argued that the prime minister's revulsion toward Trumpism is only skin-deep.
"I think when you connect the dots, his moves do not add up to the vision that Canadians truly want and deserve in this perilous moment," he said. "Half a trillion dollars in a decade for weapons to make Canada a major arms exporter in a war-torn world. Slashing our cherished public services, sweeping aside indigenous rights... No regulations on AI and pipelines."
"In the last federal election, Canadians voted to say no to Trump and Trumpism," Lewis said. "What they're getting instead is our government following the US into a future of wars, fossil fuels, austerity, and job-killing generative AI."
Lewis will face a difficult task ahead in rebuilding the NDP from a disastrous loss of support under its previous leader, Jagmeet Singh, who stepped down from his post after the party suffered the worst defeat in its history during last April’s elections, dropping to just seven seats in Parliament—not even enough to be considered a “recognized” party.
The role of NDP leader is the highest office Lewis has held in his life, having run two failed campaigns for parliament in his native Vancouver in 2021 and 2025.
Though NDP currently sits at a distant third, with only about 7% support according to an Abacus poll from March, other polls show that their positions, including a wealth tax and expanding federal health coverage, are popular with the vast majority of voters across party lines.
Other polls show that Canadians, especially those with low incomes, increasingly view affordability and inequality as pressing issues, especially as Trump's war against Iran has caused global energy shortages and price hikes.
"The NDP is coming back because we know that a thriving world is possible, and we know who is standing in our way, and there are way more of us than there are of them," Lewis said. "The NDP will start winning again because we will become that beacon to the 99%."
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Progressive Activist Avi Lewis Launches Bid for NDP Leadership in Canada
Lewis said NDP must “fling the doors wide open, and build a party for the 99%.”
Sep 25, 2025
The longtime progressive activist Avi Lewis officially launched his bid for leadership of Canada's New Democratic Party, which he aims to revitalize with a platform of economic populism.
Lewis, a journalist and documentarian whose grandfather helped to found the NDP in 1961, says the way to bring the party back to relevance amid an electoral low point is to “fling the doors wide open, and build a party for the 99%.”
At a kickoff party in Toronto on Wednesday, the former parliamentary candidate from Vancouver railed against the “Liberal-Conservative alliance” that dominates Canadian politics. The two major parties' leaders, Lewis said, "compete fiercely in public, while behind the scenes, they collude to boost corporate profits."
"In the name of protecting the country, the government is rapidly passing and proposing legislation that will change the culture and character of Canada," Lewis said. "From sweeping aside Indigenous rights and environmental protections for so-called nation-building projects, to rolling back higher taxes on the uberwealthy and digital giants, to the generational austerity of 15% cuts to public spending, to the $9 billion that materialized in an instant for the military this year, ramping up to $150 billion a year a decade from now—the changes afoot are extreme."
Lewis pledged to “build a government that is an instrument for the people, not for corporate Canada.”
The NDP—once Canada's third-largest national political party—has been ailing of late after a dismal showing in the nation's most recent parliamentary elections. The party, which held over 100 seats 14 years ago, dropped to a new low of just seven seats in 2025, not enough to even be recognized for committee assignments or federal funding.
The humiliating showing resulted in the resignation of Jagmeet Singh, who'd led the party for eight years, but was widely criticized by those on the left for his coziness with the establishment of the dominant Liberal Party and his failure to keep the NDP competitive. It is in this state of "political wilderness" that Lewis has emerged with an ambitious change agenda.
(Video: Avi Lewis for NDP Leader)
"Life in Canada today feels on the edge," Lewis said in a video released last week announcing his leadership run. "Everyone seeking a little stability, everyone being told 'You're all on your own.'"
He identified several causes of that precarity. One was the "economic attack" from US President Donald Trump, whom Lewis described as sending "disruption grenades" in the form of steep tariffs and annexation threats. But Lewis said that Trump merely "magnifies... the everyday emergency of trying to get by in an impossible economy."
According to one survey conducted in July, 57% of Canadians said their current incomes did not allow them to afford basic necessities like housing, groceries, energy, and cell phone plans.
"Working hard doesn't earn you a living," Lewis said.
"These days, every politician claims to be shocked by the costs," he continued. "What they don't talk about is why: The billions in profits for the tiny group of corporations that control every part of our economy. Three phone providers, three grocery giants, five oil companies, and the five big banks that fund them."
Lewis' plan to confront corporate power is years in the making. Alongside his wife, the acclaimed journalist and author Naomi Klein, Lewis rolled out the Leap Manifesto in 2015 as an agenda for the NDP. Leap focused on confronting the climate crisis, but its contents formed the basis of what he now refers to as a "Green New Deal." The accelerating climate emergency remains at the center of his agenda in 2025.
"Oil and gas CEOs," he said in the video, are "not just hoarding extreme wealth," but "foreclosing on our shared future."
Lewis has never held a parliamentary office, though he has run for a federal Vancouver-area seat twice before and achieved two third-place finishes, receiving 26% of the vote in 2021 and 12.5% in 2025.
In his bid to lead NDP, he has so far leaned heavily into his family legacy and his reputation as a lifelong activist who has "butted heads with the powerful," over issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the privatization of healthcare and public transit.
"For four decades," he said, "I have stood with workers, telling stories of working-class heroes and organizing for dignity in factories and fields, classrooms and care homes, shop floors and fishing fleets."
Lewis, who also identified free trade deals as job killers, proposed a "Green New Deal" as a means to revive Canadian industry and create "millions of good-paying jobs."
He has also proposed a wealth tax, a national cap on rent increases, a public option for groceries, and expanded universal healthcare that covers "medication to mental health."
During his speech Wednesday night, Lewis described NDP as "the only party that can accurately diagnose the cause of our everyday emergency, and offer solutions as big as the crises we face."
"The federal government has the power, the resources, and the responsibility to ensure the fundamentals of a good life—healthy food, truly affordable housing, functioning public transit, and hey, maybe a proper vacation once in a while," he said. "But we won’t get it if we don’t fight for it. And that’s where the NDP comes in. After all, the NDP is the original party of workers’ struggle. And in this moment of epic change and uncertainty, the party is needed as never before."
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