Assuming the second refers to “Stuttgart 21”?
I think both of these examples might have been for novel concerns in their specifics (e.g. a specific new train station project), but there is a lot of precedent for this kind of process as well as a strong existing civil society doing this kind of protest (e.g. a long history of environmentalist and mass protests against large new infrastructure projects).
Maybe this is also true for AI risk (e.g. maybe it fits neatly into other forms of anti-tech sentiment and could “spontaneously” generate mass protests), but I don’t think these examples seem well-described as not having precedents / lots of societal and cultural preconditions (e.g. you probably would not have seen mass protests against the train station without a long history of environmental protests in Southern Germany).
Johannes Ackva
Karma: 2
Thanks for clarifying, I can see that.
I think my model is more “if there’s an incident that increases the salience of AI x risk concerns, then an existing social movement structure that can catalyze this will be very valuable” which is different from assuming that Pause AI by itself will drive that.
In a similar way then, say, after Fukushima in Germany the existence of a strong environmental movement facilitated mass protests whereas in other countries ~nothing happened despite objectively the same external shock.