I just wanna state this gives me a feeling of the blind leading the blind.
I think I agree with this. To illustrate: When I met John (which was an overall pleasant interaction) I really did not think that the hat and sunglasses looked cool, but just assumed this was Berkeley style idiosyncracy. Usually I would not deem it appropriate to comment about this publicly, but since it was used as an example in the post this feels like a relevant enough data point to bring up.
So:
Not sure whether “weak government” applies. Factually, it does not seem like the federal administration is very interested in taking action on regulating AI, but on the other hand I do not think most voters perceive the Trump government as weak? I am also not sure I understand the point, but at any rate currently the moderates are not willing to denouncethe actions publicly very much?
There is some momentum, but change does not seem to happen likely anyway. Arguably, after the FLI letter two years have passed without major changes.
I don’t think we are at peak activism yet, but also the movement is not clearly declining either.
There is strong polarization according to some viewpoints: Twitter and certain parts of the administration are very happy to point to “radical doomers” for discreditation.
Overall, I think these are a wash, but no strong yes. At any rate, I have the hunch that these factors were derived from large social movements whose path to impact was very bottom up and around high saliency issues to the public. At least for the moderates in this debate this is not the path to impact I think, it’s rather influencing key stakeholders.