Comments
(Apologies in advance for the messiness from my lack of hyperlinks/footnotes as I'm commenting from my phone and I can't find how to include them using my phone. If anyone knows how to, please let me know)
This is something which has actually briefly crossed my mind before. Looking (briefly) into the subject, I believe an alliance with the climate advocacy movement could be a plausible route of action for the AI safety movement. Though this of course would depend on whether AI would be net-positive or net-negative for the climate. I am not sure yet which it will be, but it is something I believe is certainly worth looking into.
This topic has actually gained some recent media attention (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/03/tech/google-ai-greenhouse-gas-emissions-environmental-impact/index.html), although most of the media focus on the intersection of AI and climate change appears to be around how AI can be used as a benefit to the climate.
A few recent academic articles (1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032123008778#b111, 2. https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1Wt2_f1RB7ylf7ufD8LviiD6lKkQpQnWZ&export=download, 3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-021-01294-x, 4. https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/widm.1507) go in depth on the topic of how beneficial/harmful AI will be the climate, and basically the conclusions appear somewhat mixed (I admittedly didn't look into them in too much detail), with there being a lot of emissions from ML training and servers, though this paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05149) has shown that
"published studies overestimated the cost and carbon footprint of ML training because they didn’t have access to the right information or because they extrapolated point-in-time data without accounting for algorithmic or hardware improvements."
There could also be reasons to think that this may not be the best move particularly if it's association with the climate advocacy movement fuels a larger right-wing x E/Acc counter-movement, though I personally feel it would be better to (at least partly) align with the climate movement to bring the AI slowdown movement further into the mainstream.
Another potential drawback might be if the climate advocates see many in the AI safety crowd as not being as concerned about climate change as they may hope, and they may see the AI safety movement as using the climate movement simply for their own gains, especially given the tech-sceptic sentiment in much of the climate movement (though definitely not all of it). However, I believe the intersection of the AI safety movement with the climate movement would be net-positive as there would be more exposure of the many potential issues associated with the expansion of AI capabilities owing to the climate movement being a very well established lobbying force, and in a sense the tech-scepticism in the climate movement may also be helpful in slowing down progress in AI capabilities.
Also, this alliance may spread more interest in and sympathy towards AI safety within the climate movement (as well as more climate-awareness among AI safety people), as has been done with the climate and animal movements, as well as the AI safety and animal welfare movements.
Another potential risk is if the AI industry is able to become much more efficient (net-zero, net-negative, or even just slightly net-positive in GHG emissions) and/or come up with many good climate solutions (whether aligned or not), which may make climate advocates more optimistic about AI (though this may also be a reason to align with the climate movement to prevent this case from ocurring).
I've never heard this idea proposed before so it seems novel and interesting.
As you say in the post, the AI risk movement could gain much more awareness by associating itself with the climate risk advocacy movement which is much larger. Compute is arguably the main driver of AI progress, compute is correlated with energy usage, and energy use generally increases carbon emissions so limiting carbon emissions from AI is an indirect way of limiting the compute dedicated to AI and slowing down the AI capabilities race.
This approach seems viable in the near future until innovations in energy technology (e.g. nuclear fusion) weaken the link between energy production and CO2 emissions, or algorithmic progress reduces the need for massive amounts of compute for AI.
The question is whether this indirect approach would be more effective than or at least complementary to a more direct approach that advocates explicit compute limits and communicates risks from misaligned AI.