Create public relations nightmare for anyone producing risky AGI:
Please provide constructive criticism.
One powerful way to get people thinking about safety is if clever ways are invented to shout from the rooftops that this could be dangerous and present the message in a way that most people will grok. If everybody is familiar enough with how dangerous it could be, then funding an AGI project without a safety plan in place would be a PR disaster for the companies doing it. That would put a lot of pressure on them to put safeties into place. This wouldn't need to cost a lot. Sometimes small, clever acts can get a huge amount of attention. For instance, Improv Everywhere. Imagine what would happen if a few hundred volunteers gathered in every major city on the same day and did this:
Dressed in business suits, covered in happy face stickers, they start asking strangers "Have you seen my robot anywhere? It was trying to make me happy and it covered me in these stickers. What do you think it will do next?" They'll probably say "I don't know." And you could respond "Yeah, the companies currently building robots like this one have no idea what they're going to do either... you might need this (the volunteer hands them a pamphlet on AGI safety) "I've got to keep an eye out for my robot." (Then they go away and do it again.) The suits are important because they would contrast the happy face stickers such that the message was more likely to be interpreted as "Being covered in happy face stickers is very embarrassing and therefore really bad" as opposed to just seeming silly, gives the person an upper-class look that supports the idea that they own a robot, and also makes strangers more likely to interpret somebody covered in happy face stickers as sane.
Another idea: If the internet "wears" black for a time, like they did for SOPA, that could work to get attention. Surely intelligent people in tech companies would grok the threat that unfriendly AGI poses to humanity, and they're in a unique position to warn about it. It's not like the people on this forum have no connections to the technology world...
Even if millions of dollars aren't available to spend on a public advertising campaign, if enough people try enough clever ways to get everyone's attention (internet memes on youtube for instance) then something will probably get through. When large masses of people fear something, they tend to push for regulation and tend to scare investors off. They can also be given specific actions to take.
See Also "Sabotage would not work"
I know people have talked about this in the past, but now seems like an important time for some practical brainstorming here. Hypothetical: the recent $15mm Series A funding of Vicarious by Good Ventures and Founders Fund sets off a wave of $450mm in funded AGI projects of approximately the same scope, over the next ten years. Let's estimate a third of that goes to paying for man-years of actual, low-level, basic AGI capabilities research. That's about 1500 man-years. Anything which can show something resembling progress can easily secure another few hundred man-years to continue making progress.
Now, if this scenario comes to pass, it seems like one of the worst-case scenarios -- if AGI is possible today, that's a lot of highly incentivized, funded research to make it happen, without strong safety incentives. It seems to depend on VCs realizing the high potential impact of an AGI project, and of the companies having access to good researchers.
The Hacker News thread suggests that some people (VCs included) probably already realize the high potential impact, without much consideration for safety:
Is there any way to reverse this trend in public perception? Is there any way to reduce the number of capable researchers? Are there any other angles of attack for this problem?
I'll admit to being very scared.