Orpheus16

In May and June of 2023, I (Orpheus) had about 50-70 meetings about AI risks with congressional staffers. I had been meaning to write a post reflecting on the experience and some of my takeaways, and I figured it could be a good topic for a LessWrong dialogue. I saw that hath had offered to do LW dialogues with folks, and I reached out. In this dialogue, we discuss how I decided to chat with staffers, my initial observations in DC, some context about how Congressional offices work, what my meetings looked like, lessons I learned, and some miscellaneous takes about my experience. Context hath Hey! In your message, you mentioned a few topics that relate to your time in DC. I figured we should start with your experience talking to congressional offices about AI risk. I'm quite interested in learning more; there don't seem to be many public resources on what that kind of outreach looks like. How'd that start? What made you want to do that? Orpheus16 In March of 2023, I started working on some AI governance projects at the Center for AI Safety. One of my projects involved helping CAIS respond to a Request for Comments about AI Accountability that was released by the NTIA. As part of that work, I started thinking a lot about policy ideas for frontier AI systems. For instance: if I could set up a body to oversee frontier AI systems or assign certain tasks to existing agencies, what would that like? Where in the US government would it be housed? What information would I want it to assess? I began to wonder how actual policymakers would react to these ideas. I was also curious to know more about how policymakers were thinking about AI extinction risks and catastrophic risks. I started asking other folks in AI Governance. The vast majority had not talked to congressional staffers (at all). A few had experience talking to staffers but had not talked to them about AI risk. A lot of people told me that they thought engagement with policymakers was really important bu