My speech at the PauseAI Capitol protest April 13

maia
Mon, 04 May 2026 22:51:57 GMT

Epistemic status: emotional appeal.

Hi. My name is Maia, I’m a volunteer with PauseAI DC.

And before I joined, I used to think, well, the extinction of the human race isn’t that bad.

I mean, I thought it was bad, but it was hard for me to really feel it, you know? The idea that I would blink out of the world, and so would everyone else at the same time… It didn’t feel like such a big deal, in a way.

There would be no one left to feel sad about it. It would just all be over. And my life was going to be over someday one way or the other, so was it such a big deal, really?

And then I had kids.

...

I tried not to think about AI risk, most of the time. I’d decided it wouldn’t be a big deal, so I wasn’t going to worry about it. But– when ChatGPT came out, I worried. When the models got better, I worried. The world was changing, faster and faster.

I do art in my spare time. My oldest son is 4 now, but when he was born, I made him a painting of a lion astronaut hovering in space.

When I started that painting, computers couldn’t make art. When I finished, six months later, they could. My son is growing up in this world where, to him, computers could always make art.

Things are getting weirder. Kids can ask AI to write their school essays now. Schools are not adapting well.

But I thought: we can work around these things. We have a lot of resources as a family. If I needed to, if things got really bad, I could homeschool my kids.

I could make them write essays, by hand, on paper, to make sure they know how to do it themselves, even if someday they’ll be using AI for that kind of thing most of the time.

I don’t know what the future of work is going to be for my kids, or what school is even preparing them for, but at least I can teach them reading and math, and to be curious about the world and look for ways to make it better… and they’ll work it out somehow. All that’s going to be hard, but I think we could get through it.

But it won’t work if there’s no world for them to grow up in.

...

I still remember the moment when it really sank in for me. I was at home, the kids were in bed, my husband and I were up late, just hanging out.

There was a bad thunderstorm going on outside. All of a sudden there was this huge CRACK. Not thunder. Louder than thunder, and more immediate.

Now, I’m pretty sure it was just a transformer exploding nearby. But in that moment, I was scared. My husband and I both ran to the window. We looked at each other, and we hugged each other, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. Was this… it?

...

This was silly, of course. If a superintelligent AI decides to be done with the human race, there’s absolutely no reason it would need to warn us with loud bangs.

A bioweapon, an engineered virus, could do it easily and quietly and painlessly. Maybe every human being on Earth would drop dead within ten minutes of each other.

I’m not superintelligent. I’m sure it could think of other ways, if it needed to. Whatever was most efficient. People are already connecting AIs to their email and bank accounts; why not power grids and peptide labs next? We already have AIs in weapons systems.

And my next thought, was: Surely if the real end came, it would come with no warning, but there’s no reason it would have to be instant. Every person at once. There could be a gap. Five minutes, ten minutes.

I thought: Who would be first? Me or my kids?

...

And then I thought: What the hell am I doing, trying to pretend this can’t happen instead of fighting it?

I joined PauseAI DC not long after that. That’s what I’m here for.

Artificial Superintelligence is not safe. No one – not its creators, not the smartest people on this planet – no one knows how to control it or what it will be capable of.

We can’t let anyone build it. We CAN stop them. We have to.

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