It’s time to vote

It’s been a pretty crazy week in terms of the world waking up to the risks from AI. I’m hoping that the future is a bit safer this week than it was last. Certainly more people are realising the significant action needed to slow down AI development. 

In my day job, I’m mostly thinking about how we can put out content about how to increase the safety of the future as we approach TAI. But I’m planning to take tomorrow off from that to go to Westminster with PauseAI to call on the Prime Minister to convene an international pause treaty summit. 

I find it hard to think about the hour by hour cost-effectiveness of attending protests. I’ll try to minimise the proportion of tomorrow that I’m not working, and thankfully have the kind of work I can do on trains. 

Having said that, I do overall endorse sometimes attending protests. It’s a legible, costly signal that this is the one issue I feel strongest about and want my government to act on. I expect a social movement which uses this as one of its tools to be more successful than one that doesn’t. As EAs, we’re willing to take costly actions, but also be discerning in our asks. So I’d hope that we could be persuasive in our political activism. 

I think of attending protests when there is something important enough to warrant it as kind of like voting. Although there is compelling evidence about voting being cost-effective in some circumstances, what really motivates me to do so regularly is that I think that’s how we get a working society. Similarly, it feels like my civic duty when the stakes are high enough to tell my government how I feel by standing on the street with a placard. 

PauseAI organises protests around the world, and with different asks. The last one I went to was a march from the London OpenAI office to the Meta one, calling on company CEOs to announce publicly that they would pause AI development if other companies did too. Tomorrow’s one is outside 10 Downing Street and asks Prime Minister Andy Burnham to convene a summit about an international AI development pause. The Bletchley AI summit was a wonderful step forward in global awareness and coordination in AI safety. I hope in this moment the UK can again be proactive in safeguarding the future.