Joseph Miller's Shortform

Joseph Miller

This is a special post for quick takes by Joseph Miller. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

The next PauseAI UK protest will be (AFAIK) the first coalition protest between different AI activist groups, the main other group being Pull the Plug, a new organisation focused primarily on current AI harms. It will almost certainly be the largest protest focused exclusively on AI to date.

In my experience, the vast majority of people in AI safety are in favor of big-tent coalition protests on AI in theory. But when faced with the reality of working with other groups who don't emphasize existential risk, they have misgivings. So I'm curious what people here will think of this.

Personally I'm excited about the protest and I've found the organizers of Pull the Plug to be very sincere and good to work with, but I've also set things up so that the brands of PauseAI UK and Pull the Plug are clearly distinct, so that our messaging remains clearly focused on the risks of future AI. For example, we have a separate signup page and we have our own demands focused on decelerating frontier development.

I've talked to quite a few people and most people say it's is a good idea to use the myriad of other concerns about AI as a force multiplier on shared policy goals.

Speaking only for myself, here: There's room for many different approaches, and I generally want people to shoot the shots that they see on their own inside view, even if I think they're wrong. But I wouldn't generally endorse this strategy, at least without regard for the details of how the coalition is structured and what it's doing.

I think our main problem is a communication problem of gettin... (read more)

9Bogdan Ionut Cirstea9mo

From https://pulltheplug.uk/: [...] I think this would probably be a disaster, given how misinformed and unwise large parts of the broad public have been on many other scientific issues (e.g. vaccines, GMOs, nuclear power). The rest of their views doesn't inspire much confidence in their epistemics either:

5Eli Tyre9mo

Citizen assemblies often involve selecting a small number of delegates who are then informed about the all of the details of the issue in depth, including by expert testimonies, which the delegates have the affordance to do because they're being paid for their time. My understanding is that this works pretty well for coming to reasonable policy.