Our experience has been that talking to Congressional staffers about a ban or pause on superintelligence research tends to result in blank stares and a rapid end to the meeting. [...] A global moratorium [....] we don’t see anything that we can do to help make that happen.
Ok. Thank you for the info. Would you speculate a bit about what might change this, that other people might be able to do? E.g. what number of call-ins to their offices from constituents, or how many protests, or what industry testimony, or how much campaign funding, etc.
Fair question—although it would be speculation on my part, since we haven’t been actively studying attitudes toward a moratorium. You might do better to ask Pause AI. That said, I would think you’d need something on the scale of the Vietnam War protests to get a blanket unilateral moratorium on advanced AI inside the Overton window—protests large enough to generate major headlines on most days that continue for months on end.
If you can get very credible evidence that the UK, the EU, and China would all agree to join such a moratorium, then a smaller protest movement might be good enough, since one of the major reasons to oppose a moratorium is that it would allow rivals to pull ahead of the US. Industry testimony would also be helpful, but only if it’s sincere; there was a fair amount of skepticism when big tech companies came to DC to talk about the need for AI regulations, and that skepticism was probably warranted, since most of those companies have now reversed their positions, with even Anthropic mostly opposing CA SB 1047.
You can get a sense of how much other groups are spending on lobbying and campaign contributions from this article: https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/lobbyists-spent-record-42-billion-2023-federal-lawmakers-rcna135943. The figures listed are probably an underestimate of the actual cost by a factor of at least 3x to 10x, because in addition to actual lobbyists, you also usually pay for some think tanks, some support staff, media campaigns, and so on; the publicly disclosed figures that get used in these articles are based only on the salaries of the lobbyists. There may also be soft money donations or other hidden contributions that I’m not aware of. Lobbying is also most effective when you do it for multiple years in a row so that you can build relationships and people know who you are—it’s not like you can just buy influence overnight for a fixed amount of money; you need to be spending that money in a way that feels appropriate to DC insiders.
Ok. Thank you for the info. Would you speculate a bit about what might change this, that other people might be able to do? E.g. what number of call-ins to their offices from constituents, or how many protests, or what industry testimony, or how much campaign funding, etc.
Fair question—although it would be speculation on my part, since we haven’t been actively studying attitudes toward a moratorium. You might do better to ask Pause AI. That said, I would think you’d need something on the scale of the Vietnam War protests to get a blanket unilateral moratorium on advanced AI inside the Overton window—protests large enough to generate major headlines on most days that continue for months on end.
If you can get very credible evidence that the UK, the EU, and China would all agree to join such a moratorium, then a smaller protest movement might be good enough, since one of the major reasons to oppose a moratorium is that it would allow rivals to pull ahead of the US. Industry testimony would also be helpful, but only if it’s sincere; there was a fair amount of skepticism when big tech companies came to DC to talk about the need for AI regulations, and that skepticism was probably warranted, since most of those companies have now reversed their positions, with even Anthropic mostly opposing CA SB 1047.
You can get a sense of how much other groups are spending on lobbying and campaign contributions from this article: https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/lobbyists-spent-record-42-billion-2023-federal-lawmakers-rcna135943. The figures listed are probably an underestimate of the actual cost by a factor of at least 3x to 10x, because in addition to actual lobbyists, you also usually pay for some think tanks, some support staff, media campaigns, and so on; the publicly disclosed figures that get used in these articles are based only on the salaries of the lobbyists. There may also be soft money donations or other hidden contributions that I’m not aware of. Lobbying is also most effective when you do it for multiple years in a row so that you can build relationships and people know who you are—it’s not like you can just buy influence overnight for a fixed amount of money; you need to be spending that money in a way that feels appropriate to DC insiders.
(Thank you, seems valuable!)