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.
A few points.
With the same resources, it's probably easier and more effective to try to persuade candidates who are more successful.
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.
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.
I agree there is a pretty open lane after Biden.
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.
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.
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?
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.