Holly_Elmore

Holly is an independent AI Pause organizer, which includes organizing protests (like this upcoming one). Rob is an AI Safety YouTuber. I (jacobjacob) brought them together for this dialogue, because I've been trying to figure out what I should think of AI safety protests, which seems like a possibly quite important intervention; and Rob and Holly seemed like they'd have thoughtful and perhaps disagreeing perspectives. Quick clarification: At one point they discuss a particular protest, which is the anti-irreversible proliferation protest at the Meta building in San Francisco on September 29th, 2023 that both Holly and Rob attended. Also, the dialogue is quite long, and I think it doesn't have to be read in order. You should feel free to skip to the section title that sounds most interesting to you. jacobjacob Let's jump right into it. Rob, when I suggested discussing protests, you said you were confused about: "How do we get to be confident enough in anything to bring it the energy that activism seems to require?" I very much agree with this confusion! Robert Miles This is a pretty standard joke/stereotype, the XKCD protest where the signs are giant and full of tiny text specifying exactly what we mean. My protest sign just said "Careful Now", in part because I'm not sure what else you can fit on a sign that I would fully endorse. Holly_Elmore There's a big difference in communication style between something like science or lesswrong and advocacy. You have less bandwidth in advocacy. It's much closer to normal speech, where we don't exactly qualify every statement-- and that's in many ways more accurate as a practice considering how short of a window you have for that kind of communication. "Pause AI" does the job where an exact description of how you implement the policy does not-- it would be too confusing and hard to take in. And similarly the resolution of policy you have to discuss in advocacy is a lot lower (or the concepts higher level), so you can