Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I want to start by noting that I am amazed and somewhat in awe of what's been accomplished by the EA animal welfare movement. I am enthusiastically supportive of all campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.
I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm proud of that work.
That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.&n...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
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:
We need to put out clear, actionable asks for policymakers to translate this momentum into real solutions. We suggest:
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.