Thank you @Ulrik Horn! I think warning shots may very well be important.
From my other piece: building up organizations in anticipation of future ‘trigger events’ is vital for protests, so that they can mobilize and scale in response – the organizational factor which experts thought was most important for protests. I think the same is true for GMOs: pre-existing social movements were able to capitalise on trigger events of 1997/1998, in part, because of prior mobilisation starting in 1980s.
I also think that engineered pathogen event is a plausible warning shot for AI, though we should also broaden our scope of what could lead to public mobilisation. Lots of ‘trigger events’ for protest groups (e.g. Rosa Parks, Arab Spring) did not stem from warning shots, but cases of injustice. Similarly, there weren’t any ‘warning shots’ which posed harm for GMOs. (I say more about this in other piece!)
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.