Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸
Posts 45
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I am not making a case for who should be referred to as "the AI Safety community", and if you draw a larger circle then you get a lot more people with lower p(doom)s. You still get mostly x-risk people as opposed to other risks and people thinking that it's only x-risk that justifies intervening, implicitly if not explicitly.
> To address another claim: "The Dial of Progress" by Zvi, a core LessWrong contributor, makes the case that technology is not always good (similar to the "Technology Bucket Error" post) and the comments overwhelmingly seem to agree.
This post is a great example of my point. If you pay attention to the end, Zvi says that the dial thinking is mostly right and is morally sympathetic to it, just that AGI is an exception. I wanted it to mean what you thought it meant :(
What does a Trump 2 admin mean for PauseAI US?
We are an avowedly bipartisan org and we stan the democratic process. Our messaging is strong because of its simplicity and appeal to what the people actually think and feel. But our next actions remain the same no matter who is in office: protest to share our message and lobby for the PauseAI proposal. We will revise our lobbying strategy based on who has what weight, as we would with any change of the guard, and different topics and misconceptions will likely dominate the education side of our work than before.
The likely emphasis on defense and natsec and China competition seems to make Pause lobbying harder
This is why it's all the more important that we be there.
The EA instinct is to do things that are high leverage and to quickly give up causes that are hard or involve tugging the rope against an opponent to find something easier (higher leverage). There is no substitute for doing the hard work of grassroots growth and lobbying here. There will be a fight for hearts and minds, conflicts between moneyed industry interests and the population at large, and shortcuts in that kind of work are called "astroturfing". Messaging getting harder is not a reason to leave-- it's a crucial reason to stay.
If grassroots protesting and lobbying were impossible, we would something else. But this is just what politics looks like, and AI Safety needs to be represented in politics.
Yes, very much so. PauseAI US is a coalition of people who want to pause frontier AI training, for whatever reason they may have. This is the great strength of the Pause position— it’s simply the sensible next step when you don’t know what you’re doing playing with a powerful unknown, regardless of what your most salient feared outcome is. The problem is just how much could go wrong with AI (that we can and can’t predict), not only one particular set of risks, and Pause is one of the only general solutions.
Our community includes x-risk motivated people, artists who care about abuse of copyright and losing their jobs, SAG-AFTRA members whose primary issue is digital identity protection and digital provenance, diplomats whose chief concern is equality across the Global North and Global South, climate activists, anti-deepfake activists, and people who don’t want an AI Singularity to take away all meaningful human agency. My primary fear is x-risk, ditto most of the leadership across the PauseAIs, but I’m also very concerned about digital sentience and think that Pause is the only safe next step for their own good. Pause comfortably accommodates the gamut of AI risks.
And the Pause position accommodates this huge set of concerns without conflict. The silly feud between AI ethics and AI x-risk doesn’t make sense through the lens of Pause: both issues would be helped by not making even more powerful models before we know what we’re doing, so they aren’t competing. Similarly, with Pause, there’s no need to choose between near-term and long-term focus.
We are fiscally sponsored by Manifund and just waiting for the IRS to process our 501(c)(3) application (which could still take several more months). So, for the donor it's all the same-- we have 501(c)(3) status via Manifund, and in exchange we give 5% of our income to them. Sometimes these arrangements are meant to be indefinite, and the fiscal sponsor does a lot of administration and handles the taxes and bookkeeping. PauseAI US has its own bookkeeper and tax preparer and we will end the fiscal sponsor relationship as soon as the IRS grants us our own 501(c)(3) status.
Additionally, we've applied for 501(c)(4) status for PauseAI US Action Fund, which will likely take even longer. Because Manifund (and PauseAI US, in our c3 application) have an election h, we are able to do lobbying as a c3 as long as it doesn't exceed ~20% (actual formula is more complicated) of our expenditures, so we probably will not need the c4 for the lobbying money for a while, but the structure is being set up now so we can raise unrestricted lobbying money.
1. Our lobbying is more “outside game” than the others in the space. Rather than getting our lobbying authority from prestige or expense, we get it from our grassroots support. Our message is simpler and clearer, pushing harder on the Overton window. (More on the radical flank effect here.) Our messages can complement more constrained lobbying from aligned inside gamers by making their asks seem more reasonable and safe, which is why us lobbying is not redundant with those other orgs but synergistic.
2. Felix has experience on climate campaigns and climate canvassing and was a leader in U Chicago EA. He's young, so he hasn't had many years of experience at anything, but he has the relevant kinds of experience that I wanted and is demonstrably excellent at educating, building bridges, and juggling a large network. He. has the tact and sensitivity you want in a role like this while also being very earnest. I'm very excited to nurture his talent and have him serve as the foundation for our lobbying program going forward.
I was going on my memory of that post and I don't have the spoons to go through it again, so I'll take your word for it.