I wonder about how relevant this case study is: housing doesn’t have significant geopolitical drivers, and construction companies are much less powerful than AI firms. Pushing the ‘Overton Window’ towards onerous housing restrictions strikes me as significantly more tractable than shifting the Overton window towards a global moratorium to AI development, as PauseAI people want. A less tractable issue might require more radical messaging.
If we look at cases which I think are closer analogues for AI protests (e.g. climate change etc.), protests often used maximalist rhetoric (e.g. Extinction Rebellion calling for a net-zero target of 2025 in the UK) which brought more moderate policies (e.g. 2050 net-zero target) into the mainstream.
In short, I don’t think we should generalise from one issue (NIMBYs), which is different in many ways from AI, to what might look like good politics for AI safety people.
Hi Stephen, thank you for this piece.
I wonder about how relevant this case study is: housing doesn’t have significant geopolitical drivers, and construction companies are much less powerful than AI firms. Pushing the ‘Overton Window’ towards onerous housing restrictions strikes me as significantly more tractable than shifting the Overton window towards a global moratorium to AI development, as PauseAI people want. A less tractable issue might require more radical messaging.
If we look at cases which I think are closer analogues for AI protests (e.g. climate change etc.), protests often used maximalist rhetoric (e.g. Extinction Rebellion calling for a net-zero target of 2025 in the UK) which brought more moderate policies (e.g. 2050 net-zero target) into the mainstream.
In short, I don’t think we should generalise from one issue (NIMBYs), which is different in many ways from AI, to what might look like good politics for AI safety people.