AI companies, basically:

AI accelerationists are finished

The notion that AI extinction is just hype is a baseless, nonsensical, pseudoscientific conspiracy theory.

You know shit is real when Switzerland takes a stance on something🇨🇭

They just became the 30th county to call for international guardrails on AI

*country

Ignazio Cassis, Head of Foreign Affairs, signed the statement yesterday

Connor Leahy on the chances of Bernie's Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act passing:

"I don't think this specific bill is particularly likely to get passed, but I think a bill of its nature will."

It continues to be incredibly shocking to me that so many people can hear "there's a real chance your family will be killed within the decade if we don't stop AI companies" and proceed to do nothing about it.

If this is you and you want to change that, joining a protest is a great way to start. Not only is it valuable in and of itself, but it is also incredibly motivating to be surrounded by hundreds of people who accept their duty to protect humanity. x.com/tombibbys/stat…

"it was always going to be this way" - guy who worked to make it this way

"we tried to warn the world" - guy who soft-pedalled warnings and shrunk the window of time for people to hear them

If you feel powerless to help AI go well, something simple almost anyone can contribute to today is the following:

Combat idiotic AI-risk related memes spreading on social media.

The archetypal one is that "AI might well murder everyone" is AI company hype and marketing.

This absolutely daft idea is still all over the place, especially among left-leaning audiences.

You sometimes see it here but it's all over YouTube, TikTok, Insta, etc.

It's a convenient way for people to stick their head in the sand about the terrifying risk and social upheaval we face.

If you want to help, search to find the most popular trending new content on AI and AI risk each day on these and other platforms.

Find people making the familiar obviously-incorrect arguments and politely/briefly/clearly/correctly explain why they're wrong as early as possible.

(AI can help you figure out the best substantive arguments a wide audience can understand, and marshal supporting evidence, but if at all possible write it in your own words/voice expressing your own actual view.)

Godspeed!

This whole story is pretty cool:

- Iceland President Halla Tómasdóttir saw The AI Doc, was moved and reached out to Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin
- It prompted her to dedicate the 40th of anniversary of the Reykjavik summit on nuclear arms controls to AI

The house where Gorbachev and Reagan met:

"There's something to this idea of being able to at least step back long enough to see that competing at the expense of everything – if that comes at the cost of the planet and the very existence of humanity – who wins? No one." 🇮🇸

why are so many vegans like this

applicable:

I think people adjacent to the field don't appreciate how small AI safety is. For example, sometimes people complain about how AI safety threat models don't seem as well-developed or rigorous as climate change models. I think some of this is a skill issue on the part of AI safety researchers and advocates, which I complained about elsewhere (see reply).

However, by far the bigger issue is that there is just way more money and people going into addressing climate change than on AI safety.

There are tens of millions of people working on reducing climate change, and the core of people working on threat models ("climate scientists") number in the tens of thousands. (Yes, I was surprised by how big the numbers were too).

(Most people work on stuff like clean energy).

In comparison, there are low single-digit thousands (anything from 1,000 to 4,000 is defensible imo) of people working on AI safety, and collectively maybe low dozens of people working on figuring out threat models. (Most people work on ai safety engineering, some on policy).

So we're 4 whole orders of magnitude behind climate change in people working on addressing the issue, and maybe 3 orders of magnitude behind on threat modeling.

In terms of money, yearly spending on AI safety is in the high hundreds of millions to maybe 2 billion. In contrast, annual spending on reducing climate change (including clean energy) is in *trillions.*

So we're 3-3.5 orders of magnitude behind on spending, and 4 ooms behind on people.

The AI safety inputs picture looks a bit less bleak than this immediate comparison might suggest. For example, I think our average talent pool is somewhat higher human capital. There's also more latent interest/willingness-to-spend on AI safety than the "high hundreds of millions to low billions" current spending numbers might suggest. In contrast, climate change spending can't be scaled much higher (since you can't really jump OOMs above "trillions").

Nate Soares: Dario Amodei pretends to care about extinction to stop more engineers from quitting

"It's not for the public. It's not for the the the market. It's not for the investors. It's not for the politicians. Who the hell is this for? I think this is for the researchers."

Nate Soares: "I'm 100% ok with ignoring everything AI leaders say. Just toss them out the fricking window."

"They're trying to build recursively-self improving machines."

"Society's answer should not be: we're gonna cover our eyes and hope you fail. Go for it."