Epistemic status/content warning: have been working round the clock most of the week and will thus apparently make this announcement in awful rhymes.
Dear friends of existential AI safety,
If you expect we won't get to robust alignment in this timeline
and you're pretty sure the canaries are swarming out of the coalmine
If you're in the US and you expect from Trump
that his stance on AI can be led to slump
If you think this might be it
And we should serenade Trump and Xi ahead of the summit
Join my friends from People for a Pause
Come gather on Saturday outside the White House
Whether to sing your soul's lament
about gradual disempowerment
Or to remind Trump with zeal
of the art of the deal
Whether the data center in your backyard
turns you into a bard
Or the fear of losing your soon obsolete job
makes you secretly admire Jacob
The time has come, it may soon go
Let's open wide the Overton window!
Actual info without the eye-watering silliness:
Come join us (I'm helping out with logistics since I'll be in town) near the White House at 2 pm, Saturday, Sept 19.
Bring your friends. Tell your friends. Tell your grandma who likes to write letters to the editor, your 8-year-old cousin and their mom who live near Baltimore, your local spiritual leader who often joins their peers for training in DC, your friend who just spent a year there doing an internship and made a million friends.
Probably everyone you know, if you're in the US, knows someone in or within reasonable distance of DC! And if those people don't know that AI might kill everyone if we don't stop it..., well, now seems like a good time to be having those conversations.
Website with Luma link: peopleforapause.org
Pls RSVP on Luma - people tend to feel more enthusiastic to come to a protest if there's 'proof in numbers'
Why I'm sharing this: I work at PauseAI. We don't have a chapter in the US (it wouldn't make sense given that there's an org called PauseAI US). There are people/orgs in the US doing good work - shout out to them - and we think much more of a pause movement is needed.
People for a Pause, an organisation with similar values and theory of change to PauseAI, is launching with a lo-fi protest, and I thought I'd signal-boost them here as they're not super EA-focused. I love that they want to build a broad coalition with other movement orgs whose goals are a pause or compatible asks. The last thing the movement needs in the US is partisan or narrow-issue polarisation. The People for a Pause team seems to get this. Looking forward to seeing a bunch of you there!
PS: if you have a few hours to volunteer to organise the protest this week, contact the team via peopleforapause.org.
