Many people in this community seem to think that some sort of Pause AI-flavored activism is the best way to avert an AI catastrophe.
It occurs to me that there are two paths to increasing % mindshare of AI x-risk memes:
By increasing prevalence of x-risk memes (obvious)
By decreasing prevalence of non-x-risk memes (less obvious)
Basically, with modern social media, people are overwhelmed with signals that say “pay attention to me”. Many of them are false alarms. The high volume of false alarms makes it harder to discern the true alarm (AI x-risk).
Therefore, in addition to Pause AI advocacy, “memetic meta-advocacy” which works to decrease the frequency and loudness of false alarms could be valuable for x-risk activism.
At this point, between the two paths, the partial derivative of x-risk with respect to memetic meta-advocacy might be larger in magnitude, insofar as there is low-hanging fruit there which hasn’t yet been picked. Obviously, there is a fair amount of ambient awareness of the false alarm problem. But I don’t know if it has received a lot of concentrated intellectual firepower. I can’t name any multidisciplinary nonprofits which are making a serious effort to develop and advocate scalable/effective solutions, like attention taxes or whatever. Joining the development team for a major AI browser could be an interesting intervention point, if that’s going to be the next big shift.
The above thoughts were inspired by this WaitButWhy tweet.
Side note: I think the current memetic environment should also update us in the direction that advocacy will work less well than it has historically. Therefore, we should also brainstorm various out-of-the-box approaches, like attempting to hoard critical resources to stop the datacenter buildout.
Many people in this community seem to think that some sort of Pause AI-flavored activism is the best way to avert an AI catastrophe.
It occurs to me that there are two paths to increasing % mindshare of AI x-risk memes:
By increasing prevalence of x-risk memes (obvious)
By decreasing prevalence of non-x-risk memes (less obvious)
Basically, with modern social media, people are overwhelmed with signals that say “pay attention to me”. Many of them are false alarms. The high volume of false alarms makes it harder to discern the true alarm (AI x-risk).
Therefore, in addition to Pause AI advocacy, “memetic meta-advocacy” which works to decrease the frequency and loudness of false alarms could be valuable for x-risk activism.
At this point, between the two paths, the partial derivative of x-risk with respect to memetic meta-advocacy might be larger in magnitude, insofar as there is low-hanging fruit there which hasn’t yet been picked. Obviously, there is a fair amount of ambient awareness of the false alarm problem. But I don’t know if it has received a lot of concentrated intellectual firepower. I can’t name any multidisciplinary nonprofits which are making a serious effort to develop and advocate scalable/effective solutions, like attention taxes or whatever. Joining the development team for a major AI browser could be an interesting intervention point, if that’s going to be the next big shift.
The above thoughts were inspired by this WaitButWhy tweet.
Side note: I think the current memetic environment should also update us in the direction that advocacy will work less well than it has historically. Therefore, we should also brainstorm various out-of-the-box approaches, like attempting to hoard critical resources to stop the datacenter buildout.