I think there are various people working on it, the AI policy people at Future of Humanity Institute for example, maybe people at CSET. I recommend you read their stuff and maybe try to talk to them.
I don't consider this my area of expertise; I think it's very easy to do more harm than good by starting political movements. However, it seems likely to me that in order for the future to go well various governments and corporations will need to become convinced that AI risk is real, and maybe an awareness-raising campaign is the best way to do this. That's what I had in mind. In some sense that's what many people have been doing already, e.g. by writing books like Superintelligence. However, maybe eventually we'd need to get more political, e.g. by organizing a protest or something. Idk. Like I said, this could easily backfire.
The idea in this post, combined with my generally short timelines, makes me quite bearish on career plans that involve spending several years doing relatively unimportant things for the sake of credentials (e.g. most grad school plans).
I think this depends on how fast the takeoff is. If crossing the human range, and recursive self-improvement, take months or years rather than days, there may be an intermediate period where political control is used to get more resources and security. Politics can happen on a timespan of weeks or months. Brainwashing people is a special case of politics. Yeah I agree the endgame is always nanobot swarms etc.
I'm happy to bet on my timelines: https://elicit.org/builder/zKNSxZIhn
However, since I don't expect money to matter much in the event that I win the bet, I ask that the bets be small. I furthermore am worried that by betting on longer timelines people will make themselves psychologically more resistant to updating towards shorter timelines... The same goes for me, of course, making me extra averse to doing this. Idk.
Using Steve's analogy would make for much shorter timeline estimates. Steve guesses 10-100 runs of online-learning needed, i.e. 10-100 iterations to find the right hyperparameters before you get a training run that produces something actually smart like a human. This is only 1-2 orders of magnitude more compute than the human-brain-human-lifetime anchor, which is the nearest anchor (and which Ajeya assigns only 5% credence to!) Eyeballing the charts it looks like you'd end up with something like 50% probability by 2035, holding fixed all of Ajeya's other assumptions.
Persuasion tools: What they are, how they might get really good prior to TAI, how that might change the world in important ways (e.g. it's an x-risk factor and possibly a point of no return) and what we can do about it now.
I promised a followup to my Soft Takeoff can Still Lead to DSA post. Well, maybe it's about time I delivered...
I disagree. I would be surprised if they haven't brainstormed such a list at least once. And just because you don't see them doing any concrete action doesn't mean they aren't--they just might not be doing anything super public yet.