I went. I had a decent time. About 30-40 people showed up.
It’s hard to judge, but random people passing by seemed to have a decently high rate of sympathy, with a decent number of people taking fliers (1/4 groups of people?) that were being handed out, as well as an occasional car driving by with people honking in support of the protest. The protest definitely felt reasonably within the Overton window of protests.
To be clear, the participants were still like 80% people I knew in-person from the Bay Area Rationality/EA/AI-Alignment community, and I don’t think the pause AI stuff has so far succeeded at sparking some kind of independent protest movement. I also don’t know whether the protest did anything. We were seen by a decent number of random people in SF (my guess is around 2000-3000 people walked by or drove by and noticed us during the two hours of the protest), but it’s not super clear what that does. My guess is most of the impact is from growing into something much larger, which does seem at least plausible.
I went. I had a decent time. About 30-40 people showed up.
It’s hard to judge, but random people passing by seemed to have a decently high rate of sympathy, with a decent number of people taking fliers (1/4 groups of people?) that were being handed out, as well as an occasional car driving by with people honking in support of the protest. The protest definitely felt reasonably within the Overton window of protests.
To be clear, the participants were still like 80% people I knew in-person from the Bay Area Rationality/EA/AI-Alignment community, and I don’t think the pause AI stuff has so far succeeded at sparking some kind of independent protest movement. I also don’t know whether the protest did anything. We were seen by a decent number of random people in SF (my guess is around 2000-3000 people walked by or drove by and noticed us during the two hours of the protest), but it’s not super clear what that does. My guess is most of the impact is from growing into something much larger, which does seem at least plausible.