TOMORROW: the largest AI Safety protest ever!

I went. I had a decent time. About 30-40 people showed up. 

It's hard to judge, but random people passing by seemed to have a decently high rate of sympathy, with a decent number of people taking fliers (1/4 groups of people?) that were being handed out, as well as an occasional car driving by with people honking in support of the protest. The protest definitely felt reasonably within the Overton window of protests. 

To be clear, the participants were still like 80% people I knew in-person from the Bay Area Rationality/EA/AI-Alignment community, and I don't think the pause AI stuff has so far succeeded at sparking some kind of independent protest movement. I also don't know whether the protest did anything. We were seen by a decent number of random people in SF (my guess is around 2000-3000 people walked by or drove by and noticed us during the two hours of the protest), but it's not super clear what that does. My guess is most of the impact is from growing into something much larger, which does seem at least plausible.

Here’s a 2-min edited video of the protest.

Most people who hear our message do so well after the protest, via sharing of this kind of media.

The SF one went great! Here’s a first batch of pics. A lot of the impact will come from sharing the pics and videos.

It’s hard to say what the true impact of the events will be at this time, but they went well! I’m going to write a post-mortem for the SF PauseAI protest yesterday and the Meta protest in September and post it on EAF/LW that will cover the short-term outcomes.

Considering they are financially cheap to do (each around $2000 if you don’t count my salary), I’d call them pretty successful already. Meta protest got good media coverage, and it remains to be seen how this one will be covered since most of the coverage happened in the two following weeks last time.

Personally, I'm interested in targeting hardware development and that will be among my future advocacy directions.  I think it'll be a great issue for corporate campaigns pushing voluntary agreements and for pushing for external regulations simultaneously. This protest is aimed more at governments (attending the UK Summit) and their overall plans for regulating AI, so we're pushing compute governance as way to most immediately address the creation of frontier models. Imo hardware tracking at the very least is going to have to be part of enforcing such a limit if it is adopted, and slowing the development of more powerful hardware will be important to keeping an acceptable compute threshold high enough that we're not constantly on the verge of someone illegally getting together enough chips to make something dangerous. 

A possible counterpoint, that you are mostly advocating for awareness as opssosed to specific points is null, since pretty much everyone is aware of the problem now - both society as a whole, policymakers in particular, and people in AI research and alignment.

I think this specific point is false, especially outside of tech circles. My experience has been that while people are concerned about AI in general, and very open to X-risk when they hear about it, there is zero awareness of X-risk beyond popular fiction. It's possible that my sample isn't representative here, but I would expect that to swing in the other direction, given that the folks I interact with are often well-educated New-York-Times-reading types, who are going to be more informed than average.

Even among those aware, there's also a difference between far-mode "awareness" in the sense of X-risk as some far away academic problem, and near-mode "awareness" in the sense of "oh shit, maybe this could actually impact me." Hearing a bunch of academic arguments, but never seeing anybody actually getting fired up or protesting, will implicitly cause people to put X-risk in the first bucket. Because if they personally believed it to be big a near-term risk, they'd certainly be angry and protesting, and if other people aren't, that's a signal other people don't really take it seriously. People sense a missing mood here and update on it.

You could share the events with your friends and family who may be near, and signal boost media coverage of the events after! If you want to donate to keep me organizing events, I have a GoFundMe (and if anyone wants to give a larger amount, I'm happy to talk about how to do that :D). If you want to organize future events yourself, please DM me. Even putting the pause emoji ⏸️ in your twitter name helps :)

Here are the participating cities and links:
October 21st (Saturday), in multiple countries

• US, California, San Francisco (facebook)
• US, Massachusetts, Boston (facebook)
• UK, Parliament Square, London (Sign up, facebook)
• Netherlands, Den Haag (Sign up)
• Australia, Melbourne (Sign up)
• Canada, Ottawa (Organized by Align the World, sign up on facebook or EventBrite)
• Denmark, Copenhagen (Facebook)

In what sense do you think it will (might) not go well? My guess is that it will not go at all -- some people will show up in the various locations, maybe some local news outlets will pick it up, and within a week it will be forgotten