Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

by Simon Berens
1 min read 8

12

AI safetyPolicyUS policy
Frontpage

With AI risk getting significant media attention lately (FLI open letter, Eliezer's letter), I think it's plausible that the Overton window has expanded enough where a presidential candidate talking about it won't get immediately laughed off stage.

In addition, there seems to be increased positive sentiment around a global treaty to pause AI development within the rationalist/EA community.

It seems reasonable to me then that the rationalist/EA community should try to put forth a candidate for the US 2024 presidential election where one of their main platforms is mitigating existential AI risk.

I wouldn't expect them to succeed, but hopefully they can at least open the Overton window further to the point where at least other candidates engage with it a little and voters ask some questions.

Has there been any planning/thinking around this?

12

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Comments8


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Gil5
3
0

I am nervous about wading into partisan politics with AI safety. I think there’s a chance that AI safety becomes super associated with one party due to a stunt like this, or worse becomes a laughing stock for both parties. Partisan politics is an incredibly adversarial environment, which I fear could undermine the currently unpolarized nature of AI safety.

Reply
david_reinstein2
0
0

I suspect that opposing AI want become a very popular issue soon when a lot of people start losing their jobs to AI automation.

The safety/risk part of it might be connected to this as a way of justifying the self-interested motives (I don’t want to lose my job) in prosocial terms.

Reply
keller_scholl 🔸2
0
0

A few points.

  1. There were (expensive, time-consuming, costly) efforts to get political allies, elect friendly candidates, etc. Then FTX collapsed. That would need to be rebuilt, first.
  2. Presidential candidates are Big Deals. You get ones who are single-issue on climate, or maybe trade in years where that is particularly salient. There might be a Republican challenger this year who's notably pro-choice relative to current Republican policy positions.
  3. On the Democratic side, challenging Biden is a way to make yourself Very Unpopular with party elites. Challenging Harris, if she is his chosen successor, would be That But Worse. It might be worth it, but there are serious costs.
  4. On the Republican side, you need a candidate who can compete with DeSantis and Trump. A single issue that most people don't care about won't cut it. Generalized anti-tech sentiment, maybe?

With the same resources, it's probably easier and more effective to try to persuade candidates who are more successful. 

Reply
Cullen 🔸2
1
0

On the Democratic side, challenging Biden is a way to make yourself Very Unpopular with party elites. Challenging Harris, if she is his chosen successor, would be That But Worse.

This seems very wrong to me. Harris is very unpopular.

Reply
keller_scholl 🔸3
0
0

From what I can tell, Harris has impressively low name recognition and is fairly unpopular with voters. That doesn't mean that party elites won't object to an outside group sponsoring a candidate who doesn't have their blessing.

Reply
david_reinstein2
0
0

I agree there is a pretty open lane after Biden.

Reply
Gil1
0
0

Ooh, now this is interesting!

Running a candidate is one thing, actually getting coverage for this candidate is another. If we could get a candidate to actually make the debate stage in one of the parties that would be a big deal, but that would also be very hard. The one person who I can think who could actually get on the debate stage is Andrew Yang, if there ends up being a Democratic primary (which I am not at all sure about). If I recall he has actually talked about AI x-risk in the past? Even if that’s wrong, I know he has interacted with EA before, so it’s possible we could convince him to talk about it. He probably won’t make it his entire (or even main) platform though.

Without Andrew Yang on the debate stage, I’m not sure how much coverage we could really expect to get. I made a conscious effort not to pay attention to random non-debate candidates last election, so maybe others will have a better idea, but I think non-debate candidates got really low visibility. Still maybe more than nothing, but certainly not a big splash.

Reply
Vilfredo's Ghost1
0
0

Why run a quixotic Presidential campaign when you could actually elect a bunch of Congresspeople? I don't think you need to rebuild SBF's infrastructure to do that; the average winner of an open House seat only spent $2.2 million in 2020. You wanna talk Senate/serious Presidential races you probably need better infrastructure; House races you could probably fund just from Carrick Flynn's non-SBF donor list plus the connections anyone in position to be a viable candidate already has.

Reply
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
[Cross-posted from my Substack here] If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right? The answer is all of them and none of them. This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say: * Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement. * Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick. * Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement. * Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964. * Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly. * And so on… To paint this picture, we can see this in action below: Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things: 1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing 2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
 ·  · 2m read
 · 
I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons. 1. Scalability 2. Capital counterfactuals 3. Standards 4. Learning potential 5. Earning to give potential These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1] Scalability There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations. Capital Counterfactuals I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue. Standards Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want. Learning Potential Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
 ·  · 31m read
 · 
James Özden and Sam Glover at Social Change Lab wrote a literature review on protest outcomes[1] as part of a broader investigation[2] on protest effectiveness. The report covers multiple lines of evidence and addresses many relevant questions, but does not say much about the methodological quality of the research. So that's what I'm going to do today. I reviewed the evidence on protest outcomes, focusing only on the highest-quality research, to answer two questions: 1. Do protests work? 2. Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Here's what I found: Do protests work? Highly likely (credence: 90%) in certain contexts, although it's unclear how well the results generalize. [More] Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Yes—the report's core claims are well-supported, although it overstates the strength of some of the evidence. [More] Cross-posted from my website. Introduction This article serves two purposes: First, it analyzes the evidence on protest outcomes. Second, it critically reviews the Social Change Lab literature review. Social Change Lab is not the only group that has reviewed protest effectiveness. I was able to find four literature reviews: 1. Animal Charity Evaluators (2018), Protest Intervention Report. 2. Orazani et al. (2021), Social movement strategy (nonviolent vs. violent) and the garnering of third-party support: A meta-analysis. 3. Social Change Lab – Ozden & Glover (2022), Literature Review: Protest Outcomes. 4. Shuman et al. (2024), When Are Social Protests Effective? The Animal Charity Evaluators review did not include many studies, and did not cite any natural experiments (only one had been published as of 2018). Orazani et al. (2021)[3] is a nice meta-analysis—it finds that when you show people news articles about nonviolent protests, they are more likely to express support for the protesters' cause. But what people say in a lab setting mig
Recent opportunities in AI safety
9
An International Collaborative Hub for Advancing AI Safety Research
Cody Albert
· · 6m read
0
0
28
Apply to the Cambridge ERA:AI Fellowship 2025
Harrison 🔸
· · 3m read
0
0
24
Last week to apply for the Futurekind AI Fellowship! (deadline: April 1)
Jay Luong
· · 1m read
0
0
View more