This is a linkpost for https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/dont-associate-ai-safety-with-activism
Don't Associate AI Safety With Activism
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Since I'm actually in that picture (I am the one with the hammer) I feel an urge to respond to this post. The following is not the entire endorsed and edited worldview/theory of change of Pause AI, it's my own views. It may also not be as well thought-out as it could be.
Why do you think "activists have an aura of evil about them?" in the UK where I'm based, we usually see a large march/protest/demonstration every week. Most of the time, the people who agree with the activists are vaguely positive and the people who disagree with the activists are vaguely negative, and stick to discussing the goals. I think if you could convince me that people generally thought we were evil upon hearing about us, just because we were activists (IME most people either see us as naïve, or have specific concerns relating to technical issues, or weirdly think we're in the pocket of Elon Musk -- which we aren't) then I would seriously update my views on our effectiveness.
One of my views is that there are lots of people adjacent to power, or adjacent to influence, who are pretty AI-risk-pilled, but who can't come out and say so without burning social capital. I think we are probably net positive in this regard, because every article about us makes the issue more salient in the public eye.
Adjacently, one common retort I've heard politicians give to lobbyists is "if this is important, where are the protests?" And while this might not be the true rejection, I still think it's worth actually doing the protests in the meantime.
Regarding aesthetics specifically, yes we do attempt to borrow the aesthetics of movements like XR. This is to make it more obvious what we're doing and create more compelling scenes and images.
(Edited because I posted half of the comment by mistake)
My answer is going to be unsatisfying - entirely vibes. While there are still significant sections of the populace that have left-over affection for anything that looks like the Civil Rights movement due to how valorized that movement is and how much change it affected, this is seriously waning. The non-effectiveness of movements that just copy the aesthetics are slowly making them look more like cargo-cults that copy the form but without an understanding of the substance that made them successful.
As more people dismiss protestors as performance without substance, protests start getting more awful to get anyone's attention. Destroying social value and public goods for a cause no one else cares about grows increasingly irksome. When major lawlessness threatens people and sets fire to city blocks in the name of activism the good will drains away pretty rapidly. Now the cargo cults are just destroying stuff without any path to how that's supposed to make things better.
It's an ongoing change. We're only seeing the start of it. But IMO its pretty undeniable that a decent percentage of the population thinks of activists as default harmful, and a preference cascade is just over the horizon.
There had been a study comparing the effects of moderate protests vs extreme protests, in hypothetical situations (the study participants would e.g. read a fictional article describing the activities of a protest group), and concluded that "Extreme Protest Actions Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements":
How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions—protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both—typically reduce support for social movements. Across 6 experiments, including 3 that were preregistered, participants indicated less support for social movements that used more extreme protest actions. This result obtained across a variety of movements (e.g., animal rights, anti-Trump, anti-abortion) and extreme protest actions (e.g., blocking highways, vandalizing property). Further, in 5 of 6 studies, negative reactions to extreme protest actions also led participants to support the movement's central cause less, and these effects were largely independent of individuals' prior ideology or views on the issue. In all studies we found effects were driven by diminished social identification with the movement. In Studies 4-6, serial mediation analyses detailed a more in-depth model: observers viewed extreme protest actions to be immoral, reducing observers' emotional connection to the movement and, in turn, reducing identification with and support for the movement. Taken together with prior research showing that extreme protest actions can be effective for applying pressure to institutions and raising awareness of movements, these findings suggest an activist's dilemma, in which the same protest actions that may offer certain benefits are also likely to undermine popular support for social movements.
It could be that moderate protests are useful. It would be an interesting test of a group: whether it's able to consistently avoid extreme behavior.
I guess it depends on the political bubble. So this may not necessarily be about activists as such, but about some political bubbles increasing recently (something something Russia Today something something Trump).
I feel like activists are generally seen like this when one disagrees with their cause, and seen as brave people doing an important thing when one agrees with their cause. If one doesn't have an opinion, could go either way, depending on how much they seem to violate generally-accepted norms and how strongly the person in question feels about those norms.
Interestingly enough, this applies to corporate executives and bureaucracy leaders as well. Many see the world in a very zero-sum way (300 years ago and most of history before that, virtually all top intellectuals in virtually all civilizations saw the universe as a cycle where civilizational progress was a myth and everything was an endless cycle of power being won and lost by people born/raised to be unusually strategically competitive) but fail to realize that, in aggregate, their contempt for cause-having people ("oh, so you think you're better than me, huh? you think you're hot shit?") have turned into opposition to positive-sum folk, itself a cause of sorts, though with an aversion to activism and assembly and anything in that narrow brand of audacious display.
It doesn't help that most 'idealistic' causes throughout human history had a terrible epistemic backing.
Yeah, I think the mainstream view of activism is something like "Activism is important, of course. See the Civil Rights and Suffrage movements. My favorite celebrity is an activist for saving the whales! I just don't like those mean crazy ones I see on the news."
That mainstream is like one side of the American political spectrum, now also do the other side. ;)
Seems to me there are three factors to how one perceives an activist, most important first:
- Do I support their agenda, or do I oppose it?
- If I oppose their agenda, how threatened do I feel by their activism? If I support their agenda, how devastating blow do I think they delivered to my enemies?
- How do the activists actually behave? Do they politely express their opinions? Do they destroy public and private property? Do they attack other people?
The problem is that the third point is the least important one. A typical person will excuse any violence on their side as "necessary" (and sometimes also as "cool"). On the other hand, even seemingly peaceful behavior cannot compensate for the fact that "their goals are evil".
Basically, the third point mostly matters for people who don't have a dog in this fight. The more radicalized is the society, the fewer such people are.
I sometimes wonder about this. This post does pose the question, but I don't think it gives an analysis that could make me change my mind on anything, it's too shallow and not adversarial.
1[edit: clarifying violent/destructive direct action vs nonviolent obstructive direct action.]
I have a different point of view on this. I think PauseAI is mistaken, and insofar as they actually succeeded at their aims would in fact worsen the situation by shifting research emphasis onto improving algorithmic efficiency.
On the other hand, I believe every successful nonviolent grassroots push for significant governance change has been accompanied by a disavowed activist fringe.
Look at the history of Ghandi's movement, of MLK's. Both set their peaceful movements up in opposition to the more violent/destructive direct-action embracing rebels (e.g. Malcom X). I think this is in fact an important aid to such a movement. If the powers-that-be find themselves choosing between cooperating with the peaceful protest movement, or radicalizing more opponents into the violent/destructive direct-action movement, then they are more likely to come to a compromise. No progress without discomfort.
Consider the alternative, a completely mild protest movement that carefully avoids upsetting anyone, and no hint of a radical fringe willing to take violent/destructive direct action. How far does this get? Not far, based on my read of history. The BATNA of ignoring the peaceful protest movement versus compromising with them is that they keep being non-upsetting. The BATNA of ignoring the peaceful protest movement when there is a violent/destructive protest movement also ongoing which is trying to recruit from the peaceful movement, is that you strengthen the violent/destructive activist movement by refusing to compromise with the peaceful movement.
I do think it's important for the 'sensible AI safety movement' to distance itself from the 'activist AI safety movement', and I intend to be part of the sensible side, but that doesn't mean I want the activist side to stop existing.
Look at the history of Ghandi's movement, of MLK's. Both set their peaceful movements up in opposition to the more direct-action and/or violence-embracing rebels (e.g. Malcom X)
King specifically endorsed "direct action" using those exact words, for instance in his letter from Birmingham jail, which is often read in schools when discussing the political activism of that era. King's notion of "nonviolent direct action" included protest marches obstructing public streets, sit-ins obstructing private businesses, and other illegal public demonstrations.
You may well ask, "Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
Good point, I should use a different term to distinguish "destructive/violent direct action" from "non-violent obstructive/inconvenient direct action".
I think PauseAI would be more effective if it could mobilise people who aren't currently associated with AI safety, but from what I can see it largely draws from the same base as EA. It is important to involve as wide a section of society as possible in the x-risk conversation and activism could help achieve this.
I am also not impressed with the pause AI movement and am concerned about AI safety. To me focusing on AI companies and training FLOPS is not the best way to do things. Caps on data center sizes and worldwide GPU production caps would make more sense to me. Pausing software but not hardware gives more time for alignment but makes a worse hardware overhang. I don't think thats helpful. Also they focus too much on OpenAI from what I've seen. xAI will soon have the largest training center for a start.
I don't think this is right or workable https://pauseai.info/proposal - figure out how biological intelligence learns and you don't need a large training run. There's no guarantee at all that a pause at this stage can help align super AI. I think we need greater capabilities to know what we are dealing with. Even with a 50 year pause to study GPT4 type models I wouldn't be confident we could learn enough from that. They have no realistic way to lift the pause, so its a desire to stop AI indefinitely.
"There will come a point where potentially superintelligent AI models can be trained for a few thousand dollars or less, perhaps even on consumer hardware. We need to be prepared for this."
You can't prepare for this without first having superintelligent models running on the most capable facilities then having already gone through a positive Singularity. They have no workable plan for achieving a positive Singularity, just try to stop and hope.
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