I plan on donating to PauseAI, but I’ve put considerable thought into reasons not to donate.
I gave some arguments against slowing AI development (plus why I disagree with them) in this section of my recent post, so I won’t repeat those.
There’s not that much evidence that protests are effective. There’s some evidence, including a few real-world natural experiments and some lab experiments, but this sort of research doesn’t have a good replication record.
Research generally suggests that peaceful protests work, while violent protests reduce public support. If violent protests backfire, maybe some types of peaceful protests also backfire. And we don’t have enough granularity in the research to identify under what specific conditions peaceful protests work, so maybe PauseAI-style protests will backfire.
Polls suggest there is broad public support for a pause. If there’s already public support, doesn’t that weaken the case for protesting? Perhaps that means we should be doing something else instead.
Protesting might not be a good use of resources. It might be better to lobby policy-makers.
I plan on donating to PauseAI, but I’ve put considerable thought into reasons not to donate.
I gave some arguments against slowing AI development (plus why I disagree with them) in this section of my recent post, so I won’t repeat those.
There’s not that much evidence that protests are effective. There’s some evidence, including a few real-world natural experiments and some lab experiments, but this sort of research doesn’t have a good replication record.
Research generally suggests that peaceful protests work, while violent protests reduce public support. If violent protests backfire, maybe some types of peaceful protests also backfire. And we don’t have enough granularity in the research to identify under what specific conditions peaceful protests work, so maybe PauseAI-style protests will backfire.
Polls suggest there is broad public support for a pause. If there’s already public support, doesn’t that weaken the case for protesting? Perhaps that means we should be doing something else instead.
Protesting might not be a good use of resources. It might be better to lobby policy-makers.