TIL that calls to Congresspeople, particularly when many people call in about the same issue on the same day, are probably way more effective at grabbing lawmakers’ attention than I would have guessed:

• Congresspeople just don’t get that many calls. I was especially struck by the below quote from this CBS News article:
  
  “Congressman Tom Suozzi said calls to his office in [the first weeks of the Trump administration] jumped 10-fold, from 25 per day to more than 250, adding the public's voice is being heard.”
  
  25 per day across all issues is not a lot of calls!
  
  Granted that's an N of 1, but implies that the total number of constituent calls is way lower than I would have guessed. I was able to find some examples of total call volume to the U.S. Capitol Switchboard, but it's tough to estimate how many are constituent calls vs non-constituent calls, constituent casework, lobbyists/interest groups, calls from other offices/agencies, press, robocalls, etc.
  
• If you can coordinate enough of a lawmaker's constituents to call about a specific issue on the same day to make your issue one of the day’s top issues, there’s a decent chance your representative will hear about it, especially if you do so regularly.
  
  I'd already known that congressional offices track constituent calls, and that members/senior staff receive reports summarizing constituent contacts, but hadn't properly appreciated that in combination with the fact that the total number of people who call is small, a group of coordinated, dedicated callers could potentially get their issue on a lawmaker's radar on a regular basis. A widely circulated 2016 account attributed to a Senate staffer also claimed that "calls are what all the congresspeople pay attention to" (a similar point was made by former House staffer Emily Ellsworth), and that "every single day, the Senior Staff and the Senator get a report of the 3 most-called-about topics for that day at each of their offices (in DC and local offices), and exactly how many people said what about each of those topics". I’m not sure exactly how universal a daily top-3 report is, but apparently reports are produced daily at many congressional offices. (As an example, the Tom Suozzi quote from above continued as follows: "We keep track of the calls. I know exactly how many calls come in. It's reported to me every day," Suozzi said. "I know the issues they are concerned about. The number one issue they are contending about right now is Elon Musk. Number two is the funding freeze.")

This suggests that even small groups of xrisk-concerned folk living in the same area who coordinated to call the DC & local offices of their Senators and Congresspeople on a regular basis to express concern and to push for a specific action could easily push AI risk into the set of "top called about issues today" on many days, and could frequently make it into the briefings informing legislators what their constituents are calling about and asking for.

I recently became aware that PauseAI US and ControlAI already run constituent-contact campaigns, which is great. I’m hoping that they are using their newsletters to organize coordinated campaigns to get people calling on the same day where possible. In my opinion there’s plenty of room for additional advocacy orgs, ad-hoc groups that aren’t part of any larger umbrella organization (is Meetup.com still a thing?), etc. The more the merrier!

The specific action requested of your senators or reps could vary from call to call, but may I humbly request asking them to support a ban on superintelligence, e.g. via the Sanders-Casar bill. Whatever happens with this specific bill, if a substantial number of lawmakers were regularly hearing that their constituents don’t want ASI, it could increase the odds this gets reached for after the next big warning shot. Even if the staffers note that it’s always the same folks calling, it still seems important for lawmakers to know they have constituents who want an ASI ban.