Crunch Time is Now. Drop Everything.

Epistemic status: Hopeful, stressed, terrified, ecstatic.

tl;dr This could be it. For the next few days, do nothing but contact journalists and policymakers (ideally via existing orgs), attend/share/organise protests near you, and use your public profile to speak out.

This is Our Chance

The explosion of interest in AI safety over the last week has been both inspiring and dizzyingly fast. We might actually win this thing.

Events since the Jacob Coxon resignation have blown the Overton window as wide open as it is likely to get. This is the kind of chance we have dreamed of, and we have a responsibility not to waste it. We may not get another.

What You Can Do

This window will not last forever. We need to act over a matter of days, not weeks or months.

This is the time to call in favours, work overtime, and put all your strength of heart and brain into keeping our world safe.

If you work in AI safety, we think the most impactful thing for you to do is to drop everything you are doing and pour your energy into policy and media outreach.

Politicians and journalists want to be able to speak on this issue but are keenly aware of their lack of technical knowledge. Cold-emailing and cold-calling them and offering to brief them has a surprisingly high likelihood of success.

This especially includes conservative ones. We don’t care what your personal politics are, survival is a non-partisan issue.

There are many ways in which people of all skillsets and levels of experience can contribute, but we suggest three key actions:

• Contact journalists and members of congress/parliament, This is best done by volunteering for an existing organisation. We are capacity constrained and need your help. You do not need to be an expert: there are plenty of jobs that need doing.
  • PauseAI Global
  • People for a Pause
  • ControlAI
  • Humans in Control
  • Humans First
  • Evitable
  • Any other group you have a line into
• Share and attend protests in your area and invite your friends and family. For instance:
  • This PauseAI protest in London
  • This People for a Pause protest in DC
  • Occupy OpenAI (in San Francisco and New York)
  • This PauseAI protest in Berlin
• Speak out: Twitter, Instagram, wherever. Be grounded in facts, but also convey the right mood. Also, we’re in the Overton window - speak accordingly.

We need to put out clear, actionable asks for policymakers to translate this momentum into real solutions. We suggest:

• US - The people really want Donald Trump to negotiate a pause treaty with Xi Jinping and he might get a Nobel Peace Prize if he makes the deal. National security depends on it.
• UK - Andy Burnham needs to announce that the UK will convene a pause treaty summit and thereby protect its citizens and honour its legacy of global influence and world-leading safety talent (e.g. Bletchley Park Summit, UK AISI).
• Elsewhere - Every government can act within their own borders and put pressure on the US government to get on board. We cannot let unaccountable US tech giants put us all at risk.

Good Luck and Godspeed

For the first time in a very long time, we actually think things might go well for humanity. Whether that happens is up to us.

See you on the other side.

Thanks for the clear post Bruce. To add to your points, it also seems that campaigning and advocacy also created the conditions by which lots of passionate young advocates built up experience and became many of the leaders of the movement today, and that this is happening less today.

One point of disagreement I do have with this framing is that if you focus specifically on the justice movements that succeeded and then ask "Did any of them succeed by only focusing on welfare improvements?" You've made an artifically constrained reference class to compare it with, being reforms we remember as justice movements that famously won as justice movements. 

I think the better reference class is all attempts to radically improve the wellbeing of others. Using this reference class there are many successes including that focused on technological solutions to problems that could be framed as liberation or justice issues: child mortality reduction via global health innovations, famine reduction via green revolution, extreme poverty alleviation via economic development, women's empowerment and family planning via oral contraceptives, etc.

There's also many liberation/justice movements that failed or stalled despite decades of  intense effort and focus. 

FWIW I think you do outline some of the reasons why this particular effort is promising. I think that's the most important part to flesh out. Not all liberation efforts are equal. Each needs to be argued on their merits.

I've had a vague sense that the EA Forum is declining in quality posts/conversation despite having lots of posts, so had an AI tool (Astra) do a bunch of random analyses to look at various measures of activity level, and I think these vaguely confirm my sense. In particular, there has been a decline in commenting from higher karma users, and fewer posts are getting lots of upvotes, despite lots of people still posting. As a lover of the Forum, this seems bad and sad.

I would like for people who are giving away money to tell us where the money comes from.

• BluePerch  "is a new animal welfare grantmaker" planning to give away several million dollars. Great! Where does that money come from? Who is the donor or group of donors? Their EA post does not say, and neither does their website.
• Tilt Collective supports "efforts that improve access to nutritious, affordable, sustainable food and build on local agricultural knowledge." Their hiring page says they are a "a philanthropic initiative that advances a balanced food system." Their twitter was last updated in 2024. Their homepage features a report, a TED talk, and nothing else. Every year, they put on a Climate Week event called Food Day, which they're currently promoting on LinkedIn. (The food was very good there last year and the whole thing had signs of being well-funded.) Other than that, there's no mention of programs supported, where the money comes from, or how they make decisions about whom to support.
• Renaissance Philanthropy, same story.

You might think, it's their money, they can do with it what they please, and very wealthy people have good reasons to want privacy. To which I say:

1. A core lesson of FTX is to be cautious about whom you take money from and how you relate to them. Like Gus says on The Wire, "Maybe you win a Pulitzer behind this stuff. And maybe you gotta give it back.”
2. Obscurity helps insiders navigate and keeps everyone else out. I prefer legibility and egalitarian systems, which I think are more consistent with EA values. 

Chase Hamilton and I are spinning a longtermist space governance organization out of Forethought, and we're looking for people to join us.

We'll be doing field-building to influence and mature the existing field of space policy to more effectively address longtermist issues, and technical and policy research on orbital data centres, military activity beyond Earth orbit, AI integration of space surveillance data, and other work at the intersection of transformative AI, the industrial explosion, extreme power concentration, viatopia, and the long-term future. Happy to share internal docs on this stuff, please DM me. 

If you might be a fit to help set up an org, want to do research on space governance, or just have strong opinions we should hear, we'd love to chat: [book a meeting with us here]. Or feel free to email me at [email protected] with any questions or introductions.

Should "agree" and "disagree" be anonymous? 

What's the reason that "agree" and "disagree" are anonymous? I find it frustrating when someone clicks the "disagree" button, and then there's no accompanying post to explain the disagreement. I assume that most (all? almost all?) people on the forum would be happy to own their disagreements here, and that would also be good for transparency, etc. Curious to hear others' thoughts (and worried that I'm being incredibly obtuse).