The Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted employees (which is that ‘probationary’ means here) you end up firing quite a lot of the people who know about AI or give the government state capacity in AI.
This would gut not only America’s AISI, its primary source of a wide variety of forms of state capacity and the only way we can have insight into what is happening or test for safety on matters involving classified information. It would also gut our ability to do a wide variety of other things, such as reinvigorating American semiconductor manufacturing. It would be a massive own goal for the United States, on every level.
Please, it might already be too late, but do whatever you can to stop this from happening. Especially if you are not a typical AI safety advocate, helping raise the salience of this on Twitter could be useful here.
Do you (or anyone) have any gears as to who is the best person to contact here?
I’m slightly worried about making it salient on twitter because I think the pushback from people who do want them all fired might outweigh whatever good it does.
I called some congresspeople but honestly, I think we should have enough people-in-contact with Elon to say “c’mon man, please don’t do that?”. I’d guess that’s more likely to work than most other things?
> “My sense is that relevant people are talking to relevant people (don’t know specifics about who/how/etc.) and it’s better if this is done in a carefully controlled manner.”
And another person said:
Per the other thread, a bunch of attention on this from EA/xrisk coded people could easily be counterproductive, by making AISI stick out as a safety thing that should be killed
And while I don’t exactly wanna trust “the people behind the scenes have it handled”, I do think the failure mode here seems pretty real.
Do you (or anyone) have any gears as to who is the best person to contact here?
I’m slightly worried about making it salient on twitter because I think the pushback from people who do want them all fired might outweigh whatever good it does.
I called some congresspeople but honestly, I think we should have enough people-in-contact with Elon to say “c’mon man, please don’t do that?”. I’d guess that’s more likely to work than most other things?
Update: In a slack I’m in, someone said:
And another person said:
And while I don’t exactly wanna trust “the people behind the scenes have it handled”, I do think the failure mode here seems pretty real.