Portia's Shortform

Portia

Have y’all considered civil disobedience for AI safety? Some swimming thoughts for how it could be done.

1. Decide on a demand that is

doable
blatantly reasonable and ethical
concrete
that has consequences that have tangible value for your cause
that has symbolic value.
The importance is that there is a very specific thing you are asking for that will help and focus everyone, and that, in contrast to the massive disruption you are causing, seems super sensible and sane to grant. You want people to see your mass protest, hear what you are asking, and go "Huh, we should be doing that anyway. Why would politicians not comply and make this stop?"
My first idea: Demand a government regulation that 50 % of AI funding should go to making it friendly, not just capable reflecting that friendliness is as important as capability. That would drastically heighten the chance of friendly AI being solved, and would likely drastically improve your financial means to target this. It would also slow down AI capabilities development to buy time, or at least make sure it is matched by safety development.

2. Mobilise broadly in the public for this (you will need mass; general rule of thumb, if 10 % of the population is willing to stand up for something, it gets done, no matter what. 10 % of the population is a lot), and specifically among people who could be good representation for you cause.

An open letter/petition formulating your demand is one way to figure out who would be into supporting this. Feel like co-writing one with me? I'd suggest grabbing citations on the current funding situation, and some prominent voices on why this is dangerous, but keeping a reasonable tone, and a broad platform.
If you have any contacts to people with especially good standing you can utilise (AI researchers, to a degree also ethicists and affected parties), utilise them as figureheads and to give legitimacy (both for the open letter, and later in interviews, front lines, etc.). If they are worried about doing illegal things themselves, just getting them to publicly back you already helps a lot.
In particular, make sure your recruitment reaches people outside of your immediate social circle; e.g. every successful civil disobedience movement needed the working class behind it. This should be very doable here; the working class has massive concerns that social transformation due to AI will leave them financially and socially stranded.
And especially, especially make sure you recruit, and listen to, women and people of colour. They are likely to have key insights on how one can work against more powerful agents for justice, how dangerous this is, how risks can be mitigated; they are also likely to be on your side, as racial and sexist bias is already a problem, as is further entrenchment of injustice; long-term concerns also tend to get particular considerations in this group. They also simply make up the majority of the population, so if the movement feels inconsiderate to them, your movement is fucked.
Because you need this many people, it is crucial to make a broad plattform, and agree on demands that are collectively backed. E.g. it is absolutely in your interest for people concerned about the control problem in the long run to ally here with people considered about hostile things AI is doing right now. A lot of the research and funding and interests will overlap. If 50 % of AI funding goes into making it friendly, we'll get a big chunk for the control problem, too.
Fucking listen to people, and utilise their strengths. The public is not tools, or sheep; they are immensely powerful and varied, and you do not just need them to follow you, you need them to co-lead.

3. Plan for mental resilience and security culture from the start.

Any movement that is effective against powerful agents will be hit by brutal backlash over a significant period of time. This will take years. Being arrested is not a low stress experience. Organising within large and diverse groups is incredibly draining. No matter how important this is and how invincible you feel, you cannot just shoulder through it, you need to instead make sure, as a group, that people can recover, and support each other, and deal with their emotions. Your mental resilience is your most important resource. If your minds break down and people burn out and pull out, you have lost.
Even if, like I bloody well hope, your movement is incredibly ethical, if it is effective, it will be opposed by state and industry actors, and that can get dangerous. Think with security culture from the start. Do not trust that being in the right will protect you. Expect surveillance. Expect police brutality. Expect novel laws to be passed against you. Expect unreasonable courts.

4. Pick a symbolic and appropriate target and time for the first disruption

Ideally, civil disobedience targets an injustice by picking a ridiculously unjust law representing it, and breaking it publicly. (E.g. a black woman refusing to vacate a bus seat to protest segregation, or an Iranian woman taking off her headscarf in public, or Ghandi just walking to the ocean to make salt.) This is difficult when what you are protesting is a lack of laws.
The climate movement ran into the exact same problem, and we have quite a bit of experience by now as to what works (and what doesn't).
Ideally, picking a symbolic place, and a symbolic practice which are directly related to what you want in ways immediately clear and visible, and causing disruption that affects those who are guilty and in power directly, while also disrupting the general public to get attention (just blocking oil industry headquarters in the middle of nowhere achieved little, nobody sees you get dragged out). Instead, e.g. blocking a motorway (itself emitting excess CO2) to protest fossil fuel subsidies, right between parliament and the ministry of economics, who are in charge of those subsidies, worked extremely well as a symbol; people realise because they cannot get through by car that public transit is shit and underfunded, the politicians are late getting to work and have a loud mess right in front of their door, and the specific politicians who could affect this are primary targets.
On the other hand, blocking a random subway is stupid. People won’t get it. Subways are green transport. They are unrelated.
We also work a lot with other symbolic illegal acts, like gluing our papers on the climate collapse to the windows of parliament.
Still unsure what the ideal target here would be for AI safety. Politicians who could pass regulations at a summit where it should be on the agenda more? And disruption by fucking up tech they rely on, e.g. disrupting wifi, overloading the phone network? These ideas are still lousy, but I think collectively, we could find good ones.

5. Absolutely ensure that no innocent people are harmed, and that your ethical behaviour is perfect.

This means e.g. when you block a road, you need a way to let emergency vehicles pass. (E.g. when glueing yourself to a road to prevent removal, glue yourself in a fashion where you can roll to the side to open a medical corridor.)
Do not assume that everyone will respond to you fairly or intelligently, and plan for that.
Make a clear group consensus on acceptable actions. And make sure people will actually keep to it when shit goes down.
This in particular means you need to to training on non-violent action prior to going. I do not mean just talking about it; I mean rehearsing, physically, to respond non-violently to mistreatment.
This is especially, especially crucial for white men in your movement, who often have little familiarity with being violently abused and not retaliating, and who often quickly come up with scenarios where they feel retaliation is justified. Counter this preventively.
It also means taking collective accountability, and immediately countering members who act out.

6. Proactively manage your image.

When black students went into segregated cafes, only for the cafes to brutally throw them out, or shut down the whole cafe for hygiene reasons, it was crucial and tactical that the students were clean, well-dressed, with neat hair white people like, and politely spoken. They put a lot of work into class signalling there, and were very careful to counter stereotypes. Not because they agreed with them - throwing out black people who have afros is fucked - but because they knew how an effective imagery would look.
Analogously, make sure you do not look like crazy nerds out of touch with reality. Make sure members of your audience who do not fit this stereotype are prominently visible.
Come up with clear visual cues, slogans, colors and names that make your group recognisable.
Actively work with the press. Make sure to invite them to come. Make sure to have people who are willing to talk to the press, competent when it comes to this, likeable on screen, and who have been explicitly briefed on what core message to get out, how to phrase it tactically, and how to react to bullshit.
Actively work with social media. You want a whole subgroup on this.

7. Post action, collectively assess what worked well, what didn’t, listen to everyone, look after each other, and plan how to do the next one to even greater effect through various strategies.

8. Repeat until your demand is met.

This has a surprisingly good track record. Got India out of colonial status, women into the vote, black people out of segregation, environmental regulations passed.

All of these have in common that they are just causes that were highly opposed by people in power, and that succeeded all the same.

They also all have in common that just asking reasonably did not suffice, and was never going to.