I met Australia’s Assistant Minister for Defence last Friday. I asked him to write an email to the Minister in charge of AI, asking him to establish an AI Safety Institute. He said he would. He also seemed on board with not having fully autonomous AI weaponry.
All because I sent one email asking for a meeting + had said meeting.
Advocacy might be the lowest hanging fruit in AI Safety.
In May and June of 2023, I (Akash) had about 50-70 meetings about AI risks with congressional staffers. …
In March of 2023, I started working on some AI governance projects at the Center for AI Safety. One of my projects involved helping CAIS respond to a Request for Comments about AI Accountability that was released by the NTIA.
As part of that work, I started thinking a lot about what a good regulatory framework for frontier AI would look like. For instance: if I could set up a licensing regime for frontier AI systems, what would it look like? Where in the US government would it be housed? What information would I want it to assess?
I began to wonder how actual policymakers would react to these ideas. I was also curious to know more about how policymakers were thinking about AI extinction risks and catastrophic risks.
I started asking other folks in AI Governance. The vast majority had not talked to congressional staffers (at all). A few had experience talking to staffers but had not talked to them about AI risk. A lot of people told me that they thought engagement with policymakers was really important but very neglected. And of course, there are downside risks, so you don’t want someone doing it poorly.
After consulting something like 10-20 AI governance folks, I asked CAIS if I could go to DC and start talking to congressional offices. The goals were to (a) raise awareness about AI risks, (b) get a better sense of how congressional offices were thinking about AI risks, (c) get a better sense of what kinds of AI-related priorities people at congressional offices had, and (d) get feedback on my NTIA request for comment ideas.
CAIS approved, and I went to DC in May-June 2023. And just to be clear, this wasn’t something CAIS told me to do– this was more of an “Akash thing” that CAIS was aware was happening.
Like you, Akash just cold-emailed people:
I sent a mass email to tech policy staffers, and I was pretty impressed by the number who responded. The email was fairly short, mentioned that I was at CAIS, had 1-2 bullets about what CAIS does, and had a bullet point about the fact that I was working on an NTIA request for comment.
I think it was/is genuinely the case that Congressional staffers are extremely interested in AI content right now. Like, I don’t think I would’ve been able to have this many meetings if I was emailing people about other issues.
There’s a lot of concrete learnings in that writeup; definitely worth reading I think.
I met Australia’s Assistant Minister for Defence last Friday. I asked him to write an email to the Minister in charge of AI, asking him to establish an AI Safety Institute. He said he would. He also seemed on board with not having fully autonomous AI weaponry.
All because I sent one email asking for a meeting + had said meeting.
Advocacy might be the lowest hanging fruit in AI Safety.
Akash’s Speaking to Congressional staffers about AI risk seems similar:
Like you, Akash just cold-emailed people:
There’s a lot of concrete learnings in that writeup; definitely worth reading I think.