I first started volunteering with PauseAI a year back, before co-founding with David and two others. I’ve seen the infrastructure bottleneck firsthand.
Back then: I spent ~6hrs drafting my first cold email. At my first meeting with a politician’s staffer, I had little infrastructure for AI x-risk advocacy, and was woeful. They opened saying frontier AI policy wasn’t their MP’s department and they can’t do anything about it, which made me wonder why they accepted the meeting. They also claimed no constituent had ever raised AI with them. As a newbie advocate, I found that implausible: the surveys had AI polling terribly, four fifths concerned about negatives and a fifth putting extinction risk inside twenty years, so how was I the first person to contact them? I left confused and demoralised. With hindsight I know that concern != outreach.
Now: We get volunteers to email MPs efficiently, by sharing sample cold emails, comparing what responses we got back, and emphasising that the main point is contacting the MP at all. You have the option of having an experienced volunteer join your first politician meeting or debrief with you. If you don’t feel up to that, we have volunteers that can meet with your MP on your behalf, no matter what state you live in. We are a relatively small chapter, and benefited from the advice and collateral provided by PauseAI Global.
This is my first time doing advocacy, and I feel unsuited, both temperamentally and skill-wise. The metrics are vaguer than the ones I use in my day job in IT automation, and we are still setting up processes to track how effective our different actions are. This still seems an effective way I can contribute to AI safety, given its neglectedness.
Our volunteer @Michael Huang attends the international Federation meetups, I’ve asked him to raise this topic.
Our meetings with politicians could not work if we couldn’t point to technical research like you are doing.
If you ever want to try advocacy, it can be as unmixed as you like: a Tasmanian volunteer’s single letter to their MP was enough to get a meeting offered, and they asked David to attend in their place.