EA - The Case for AI Safety Advocacy to the Public by Holly Elmore

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: The Case for AI Safety Advocacy to the Public, published by Holly Elmore on September 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.tl;dr: Advocacy to the public is a large and neglected opportunity to advance AI Safety. AI Safety as a field is unfamiliar with advocacy, and it has reservations, some founded and others not. A deeper understanding of the dynamics of social change reveals the promise of pursuing outside game strategies to complement the already strong inside game strategies. I support an indefinite global Pause on frontier AI and I explain why Pause AI is a good message for advocacy. Because I'm American and focused on US advocacy, I will mostly be drawing on examples from the US. Please bear in mind, though, that for Pause to be a true solution it will have to be global.The case for advocacy in generalAdvocacy can workI've encountered many EAs who are skeptical about the role of advocacy in social change. While it is difficult to prove causality in social phenomena like this, there is a strong historical case that advocacy has been effective at bringing about the intended social change through time (whether that change ended up being desirable or not). A few examples:Though there were many other economic and political factors that contributed, it is hard to make a case that the US Civil War had nothing to do with humanitarian concern for enslaved people- concern that was raised by advocacy. The people's, and ultimately the US government's, will to abolish slavery was bolstered by a diverse array of advocacy tactics, from Harriet Beecher Stowe's writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin to Frederick Douglass's oratory to the uprisings of John Brown.The US National Women's Party is credited with pressuring Woodrow Wilson and federal and state legislators into supporting the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, through its "aggressive agitation, relentless lobbying, clever publicity stunts, and creative examples of civil disobedience and nonviolent confrontation".The nationwide prohibition of alcohol in the US (1920-1933) is credited to the temperance movement, which had all manner of advocacy gimmicks including the slogan "the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine", and the stigmatization of drunk driving and the legal drinking age of 21 is directly linked to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.Even if advocacy only worked a little of the time or only served to tip the balance of larger forces, the stakes of AI risk are so high and AI risk advocacy is currently so neglected that I see a huge opportunity.We can now talk to the public about AI riskWith the release of ChatGPT and other advances in state-of-the-art artificial intelligence in the last year, the topic of AI risk has entered the Overton window and is no longer dismissed as "sci-fi". But now, as Anders Sandberg put it, the Overton window is moving so fast it's "breaking the sound barrier". The below poll from AI Policy Institute and YouGov (release 8/11/23) shows comfortable majorities among US adults on questions about AI x-risk (76% worry about extinction risks from machine intelligence), slowing AI (82% say we should go slowly and deliberately), and government regulation of the AI industry (82% say tech executives can't be trusted to self-regulate).What having the public's support gets usOpinion polls and voters that put pressure on politicians. Constituent pressure on politicians gives the AI Safety community more power to get effective legislation passed- that is, legislation which addresses safety concerns and requires us to compromise less with other interests- and it gives the politicians more power against the AI industry lobby.The ability to leverage external pressure to improve existing strategies. With external pressure, ARC, for example, wouldn't have to worry as m...