Sometimes people from middle powers ask me what middle powers can do to help the AI situation. Recently for example I was asked this by an Australian. This is what I said:

Main tool Australia and other middle power governments have is their voice. They should say loudly "We used to be dismissive of talk of superintelligence and associated risks, but now based on the accumulation of evidence we think that these things are all too serious as possibilities and could really happen in the next year or three. We consider this a threat to our sovereignty, livelihood, and even our lives, and will act accordingly. We are hereby [costly signals of seriousness e.g. declaring a national emergency, calling up the reserves, distributing PPE equipment to every citizen, banning AI companies from operating in Australia unless they allow third-party assessments of risk and in particular allow UK and AUS AISI's access to investigate incidents like Hugging Face] effective immediately. Also, we are hosting a summit in 72 hours for world leaders to come discuss the risks and benefits of recursively self-improving superintelligent AI, and whether and how AI development should be allowed to proceed."

The reason this is so important is that right now, even in the US, most citizens do not want superintelligence or RSI to happen. Unlike many political issues, this political issue is one where a supermajority would agree on what needs to be done (~pause or otherwise heavily regulate AI development immediately) if only they understood that this is a real issue and not sci-fi. Having an actual government stop acting like it's sci-fi and start acting like it's real can cause a cascading effect where a bunch of other people will see that and then start talking and acting like it's real too, which then wakes up others, etc. until all of a sudden the discourse has shifted from "ha ha if it's so risky why are they still building it ha ha" to "OK so obviously they need to stop immediately, let's do that now and then we can argue about whether and how they should be allowed to proceed."

Well, that's my advice for them about what to do, but of course they won't do that until they believe that superintelligence and recursive self improvement and loss of control risks are real, serious possibilities in the near term. So, I guess the most important thing is to help them understand that.