EA - Corporate campaigns work: a key learning for AI Safety by Jamie Harris

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Corporate campaigns work: a key learning for AI Safety, published by Jamie Harris on August 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Negotiations and pressure campaigns have proven effective at driving corporate change across industries and movements. I expect that AI safety/governance can learn from this!The basic idea:The runaway success of effective animal advocacy has been sweeping corporate reformSimilar tactics have been successful across social movementsGovAI to ??? to PauseAI: Corporate campaigns need an ecosystem of roles and tacticsPossible next stepsPragmatic research: ask prioritisation, user interviews, and message testingStart learning by doingWork extensively with volunteers (and treat them like staff members)Moral trade: longtermist money for experienced campaigner secondmentsThe runaway success of effective animal advocacy has been sweeping corporate reformAnimal advocates, funded especially by Open Philanthropy and other EA sources, have achieved startling success in driving corporate change over the past ~decade. As Lewis Bollard, Senior Program Officer at Open Philanthropy, writes:A decade ago, most of the world's largest food corporations lacked even a basic farm animal welfare policy. Today, they almost all have one. That's thanks to advocates, who won about 3,000 new corporate policies in the last ten years.In 2015-18, as advocates secured cage-free pledges from almost all of the largest American and European retailers, fast food chains, and foodservice companies. Advocates then extended this work globally, securing major pledges from Brazil to Thailand. Most recently, advocates won the first global cage-free pledges from 150 multinationals, including the world's largest hotel chains and food manufacturers.A major question was whether these companies would follow through on their pledges. So far, almost 1,000 companies have - that's 88% of the companies that promised to go cage-free by the end of last year. Another 75% of the world's largest food companies are now publicly reporting on their progress in going cage-free.Some advocates establish professional relationships with companies and encourage them to introduce improvements. Others use petitions, protests, and PR pressure to push companies over the line.Almost everyone who investigates these campaigns thoroughly seems to conclude that they're exceptionally cost-effective at making real improvements for animals, at least in the short term. There are both ethical and strategic reasons why some animal advocates doubt that these kinds of incremental welfare tactics are a good idea, but I lean towards thinking that the indirect effects are neutral to positive, while the direct effects are robustly good. There are other promising tactics that animal advocates can use, but the track record and evidence base for corporate welfare campaigns is unusually strong.Of course, animal advocacy is different to AI Safety. But something that has been so successful in one context seems worth exploring seriously in others. And oh wait, it has worked in more than one context already.Similar tactics have been successful across social movementsIn my research into other social movements' histories, I found strong evidence that pressure tactics can be effective at changing companies' behaviour or disrupting their processes:US anti-abortion activists seem to have successfully disrupted the supply of abortion services and may have reduced abortion rates.Anti-death penalty activists successfully disrupted the supply of lethal injection drugs.Pressure campaigns likely accelerated Starbucks and other chains' participation in Fair Trade certification schemes.Prison riots and strikes seem to have encouraged the creation of new procedures and rules for prisoners.There are lots of caveats, concerns,...