A hunger strike is a symmetrical tool, equally effective in worlds AI will destroy and in worlds AI will not destroy. This is in contrast to arguing for/against AI Safety, which is an asymmetric tool since arguments are easier to make and are more persuasive if they reflect the truth.
I could imagine people who are dying from a disease that a Superintelligence could cure would be willing to stage a larger counter-hunger-strike. “Intensity of feeling” isn’t entirely disentangled from the question of whether AI Doom will happen, but it is a very noisy signal.
The current hunger strike explicitly aims at making employees at Frontier AI Corporations aware of AI Risk. This aspect is slightly asymmetrical, but I expect the effect of the hunger strike will primarily be influencing the general public.
A hunger strike is a symmetrical tool, equally effective in worlds AI will destroy and in worlds AI will not destroy. This is in contrast to arguing for/against AI Safety, which is an asymmetric tool since arguments are easier to make and are more persuasive if they reflect the truth.
This is true, but a hunger strike is a technique that effectively signals conviction in one’s message. It distinguishes people who really believe that AI will soon kill everyone from grifters etc. who are exaggerating, outright lying, or just using claims like that as non-semantic flavor text.
A well executed hunger strike might cause some people to think “huh, wait, those guys seem to think this is very serious for some reason.” That alone isn’t enough, because people can have conviction, but also be delusional. You have to follow it up with arguments that people can understand for why the problem is real. But the hunger strike itself is providing important relatively hard to fake, and therefore asymmetric, evidence that something might be worth paying attention to.
I think hunger strikes, at least those AI safety ones, are primarily about attracting attention, similar to people gluing themselves to roads or destroying paintings.
If some random dude or an AI (safety) researcher is doing a hunger strike, people might go and look at their arguments or anything else AI safety related.
If terminally ill people are doing a hunger strike for development of AI, a lot of people will see that the terminally ill might be biased and have much to gain and little to lose.
I don’t quite understand your concept of symmetrical/asymmetrical tool. You want a tool that is likely to move you from a world that AI will destroy to a world where AI won’t do just that.
A hunger strike is a symmetrical tool, equally effective in worlds AI will destroy and in worlds AI will not destroy. This is in contrast to arguing for/against AI Safety, which is an asymmetric tool since arguments are easier to make and are more persuasive if they reflect the truth.
I could imagine people who are dying from a disease that a Superintelligence could cure would be willing to stage a larger counter-hunger-strike. “Intensity of feeling” isn’t entirely disentangled from the question of whether AI Doom will happen, but it is a very noisy signal.
The current hunger strike explicitly aims at making employees at Frontier AI Corporations aware of AI Risk. This aspect is slightly asymmetrical, but I expect the effect of the hunger strike will primarily be influencing the general public.
This is true, but a hunger strike is a technique that effectively signals conviction in one’s message. It distinguishes people who really believe that AI will soon kill everyone from grifters etc. who are exaggerating, outright lying, or just using claims like that as non-semantic flavor text.
A well executed hunger strike might cause some people to think “huh, wait, those guys seem to think this is very serious for some reason.” That alone isn’t enough, because people can have conviction, but also be delusional. You have to follow it up with arguments that people can understand for why the problem is real. But the hunger strike itself is providing important relatively hard to fake, and therefore asymmetric, evidence that something might be worth paying attention to.
I think hunger strikes, at least those AI safety ones, are primarily about attracting attention, similar to people gluing themselves to roads or destroying paintings.
If some random dude or an AI (safety) researcher is doing a hunger strike, people might go and look at their arguments or anything else AI safety related.
If terminally ill people are doing a hunger strike for development of AI, a lot of people will see that the terminally ill might be biased and have much to gain and little to lose.
I don’t quite understand your concept of symmetrical/asymmetrical tool. You want a tool that is likely to move you from a world that AI will destroy to a world where AI won’t do just that.