Mostly I felt like the vibe was a sort of generic lefty anti-big-tech thing [...] How did it turn into this?
It was always going to be that because protests are a leftist medium: people who know how to protest don't think like us, and vice versa. (That's why this was "[your] first ever protest".)
At the March 2024 PauseAI protest outside OpenAI's offices, the most talented speaker by far was a woman who condemned the violence AI companies were doing to Palestine. Did her speech make sense? Maybe not. But it was spoken with an authentic passion that no one else there could muster or fake. She knew the medium; we didn't.
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1don't think like us
Just want to flag that not everyone on lesswrong is libertarian or right-wing. Left xriskers are a minority but we exist.
There are very few "right-wing" LessWrongers. The above is referring to far-left activism, which I do think is a minority, but obviously the remaining distribution is not "libertarians or right-wingers", it's mostly politically moderates.
This is important to get right because people routinely try to describe the LessWrong community as some weird crazy place full of MAGA and neo-monarchist enthusiasts, when really if you look at any of the actual demographic data we have this doesn't match reality at all. E.g. vast vast majority of people on LessWrong have been voting democratic in US elections.
This is important to get right because people routinely try to describe the LessWrong community as some weird crazy place full of MAGA and neo-monarchist enthusiasts,
This is called "playing the ref". If someone is neutral, and they make an effort to be neutral, then bad faith actors will accuse them of being in league with their political enemies. The moderates, taking these accusations in good faith, are meant to move towards the accusers' position instead. The NYT campaign that doxed Scott Alexander is a good example - he was almost religiously neutral on all issues, taking every effort to steelman anything he argued against, and the NYT attacked him for allegedly being a right wing extremist.
Notably, around 2016, this methodology was used to break a lot of the old traditions of the internet, particularly in regard to free speech. Reddit and Twitter, while far from perfect, used to have an understanding that all legal speech was permitted, and were host to both plenty of moderates and to fringe subreddits on the left and right. When a coordinated campaign took place to accuse the websites of "catering to the far right" and the websites responded accordingly, the sites' cultures were shifted from mostly-leftish mostly-libertarians to almost uniformly illiberal and uniformly left, with the righties building their own websites and the liberals and libertarians often becoming radicalized in one direction or the other as neutral spaces disappeared. IMO it was one of the main contributors to the catastrophic collapse in the quality of online discourse - people don't talk to those they disagree with anymore.
I didn't read that as referring to the left wing but referring to usual activism epistemics in general; and that being left wing was the main filter there as opposed to rationalist-types.
As an example: I'm a vegetarian. Suppose that there was a rationalist movement to stop mink fur farms on grounds that they increase H1N1 risk for little gain. If a protest ended up with a general anti-factory-farming vibe, I expect similar sorts of problems despite agreeing that factory farming is bad.
I think different political factions are inclined to protest differently.
- For lefties, it's generally an organized affair involving one or more pre-existing organizations providing logistical support and planning out slogans. I think anyone living in a major city has seen protests of this kind, so I can be relatively succinct.
- For righties, it's a "civic duty" sort of thing, where people who are passionate and have the means just sort of show up and sort of figure things out on their own once they're there - they're much less enthusiastic about shouting rhyming slogans and handing out signs. The early Tea Party protests fit this theme, as do other rightie protest movements before some kind of official organization steps in.
- For populists, the idea of people showing up in force and showing the government who's in charge is the point, and the aim is to establish an organic kind of chaos that precludes efforts to disperse them while demonstrating to interested parties that there is a 'crown in the gutter' that can be picked up by backing them. The yellow vests are a good example.
While there's some overlap, I would expect that the sort of person who feels at home in one genre of protest would be uncomfortable in at least one of the others, to the point where it's arguable that they aren't the same medium.
"CEOs, back in the basement! Techbros, back in the basement!" Fuck you, assholes.
This chant precipitated a long debate in the PauseAI UK chat[1] over whether the phrase "Techbro" was productive or counter-productive. I think the anti-saying "techbro" crowd won in the end.
- ^
At the very least, there was a long debate in the chat about using "Techbro" as a slur in the days after the protest.
2I don't have much sense of whether the attendees were mostly brought in by PauseAI or by Pull the Plug.
My guess would be around 3:1 Pull the Plug:PauseAI, based on estimations from Luma signups which did not conflict with my observations. My partner's mum (who's been involved with Extinction Rebellion for a while) was there (she's also come to previous PauseAI protests) and said something about the "rent-a-mob crowd" i.e. generic lefties who come to all the generic lefty protests.
After the protest was a people's assembly. I think this bit was fully organized by Pull the Plug
Kind of. I think these were mostly the work of Assemble, which is Roger Hallam's org. Roger Hallam is kind of like a Poundland[1] version of Sani Abacha when it British protest orgs. He's been vaguely involved with Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil, and Palestine Action, as I understand it. His main issue is asking for people's assemblies as a binding part of the legislative system. On the one hand, I think spending years campaigning for a procedural/structural policy is extremely based in general; on the other hand I'm kind of bearish that these would actually fix anything. Either way, having a people's assembly selected from protesters is pretty silly, since it defeats the point of a citizen's assembly as a representative sample of the population. Either Roger realizes that this is dumb and is doing it as a publicity stunt (I would guess this is the case) or he doesn't, and he is dumb. I had to leave before the assemblies, so I don't know if he was actually there; if he's just pulling the strings from behind the scenes; or if he's less involved than I naively expected.
Unfortunately, most of the speeches were frankly dumb.
I somewhat agree. As a complete aside, the thing I remembered most from all the speeches was the guy outside Google who sang the praises of Merlin, the app which identifies birds from their song (and/or pictures, I think; there's certainly an app which does the latter as well). As an avid birder, I find this app unbelievably offensive for reasons which are deeply embedded in my soul: I have a very strong feeling that one is supposed to learn to identify birds from some mixture of random YouTube videos, one's father's old cassettes, and random old men down the bird hides; flattening this experience to an app seems to remove some of the texture of life; it's not even the case that birding is important for some critical secondary purpose (other than perhaps conservation); it feels as if I hoped merely for one tiny, minuscule segment of the human experience to retain its texture and character, to be preserved for me to enjoy as a small reminder of the time Before, and have it stay safe until The End, yet the shoggoths have somehow managed to hunt it down and slip their tendrils into it.
Anyway, let's get back on topic. At times slightly conflicted about the protest, but I'd already priced in feeling conflicted. I think the protest overall exceeded my expectations. I came away from it feeling pretty good about the whole thing. My overall trust in the judgement of Joseph and Matilda has increased as a result of this protest.
- ^
Dollar Tree, for my American readers.
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1>Either way, having a people's assembly selected from protesters is pretty silly, since it defeats the point of a citizen's assembly as a representative sample of the population.
I am not sure. There could be various benefits to using citizen assemblies in the described manner that go beyond narrow PR purposes, even if they are not perfectly representative. My guess is that representativeness is only one of the benefits many non-dumb people ascribe to citizen assemblies.
Just a short list of the possible benefits: Engaging in a discussion about the topics in a protest can lead to better retention and understanding on the side of participants; People having more political discussions in meat space rather than online is actually good; Allows making some social connections among the participants which increases the likelihood they come back; Practicing such ad-hoc citizen assemblies can increase support for them on a national level (though you could call that PR).
Was also at the protest, don't think I disagree much with what was said here.
My personal attempt to make it more superintelligence focussed was suggesting we start an x-risk chant (this was at the front of the march going towards the assembly).
"Anyone builds it we all die, it is time to pause AI" got some traction, but apparently not enough for the author to hear it. I think this one success is the sole reason I feel my personal attendance was worth it.
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1"Pause AI! 'Cause we don't wanna die!" Even better.
I have a vague recollection I might've been the one who came up with that, at I think one of the early Pause AI protests in SF with Liron.
Of course, it's simple enough that perhaps it was reinvented.
This has definitely been reinvented multiple times; I've been present for at least one, and possibly two independent discoveries.
1(Full-time Pause AI volunteer here - i.e. quit AI R&D to do this rather than any other AI safety work. Seemed under-leveraged and to have disjunctive value.)
OP's take seems about right to me. Glad we didn't completely put you off.
Of course, the main target audience for the march is not LessWrong. It's the general public and journalists - and politicians who hear from them.
In aggregate, there has been very little investment from AI safety in messaging. Most of the population still hasn't thought or talked much about superintelligence, and the default response is to find a reason not to. So there's untapped opportunity.
Timing of the wars on Anthropic and Iran diluted coverage some this time, c'est la vie.
I'm bullish about more shared protest spaces with those concerned with other AI risks. Number went up. Dilution cost was low. Disempowerment is a coherent on-ramp to AIXR. The folk behind the other XR are not dumb, are as confused about AI as any of us, and know much we nerds need to learn.
Very happy to discuss in more detail. Lots of room for ideas here.
Does anyone know who runs Pull the Plug? Was there anyone at the event who represented themselves as a leader of Pull the Plug?
Their website has not a single organizer name on it, and I really dislike not knowing who runs any organization.
Was there anyone at the event who represented themselves as a leader of Pull the Plug?
I don't remember. I'm pretty sure one or more of the protest organizers represented themselves as being representatives of pull the plug, but I don't remember who they were or what positions they said they had.
Hmm, Transformer reports: "That campaign was established in the UK at the end of last year by Harry Atkinson, a former story editor in the film industry, and Frieda Lurken, a co-founder of climate group Extinction Rebellion".
see https://www.transformernews.ai/p/scream-if-you-want-to-move-slower-pause-ai-pull-the-plug
On Saturday (Feb 28, 2026) I attended my first ever protest. It was jointly organized by PauseAI, Pull the Plug and a handful of other groups I forget. I have mixed feelings about it.
To be clear about where I stand: I believe that AI labs are worryingly close to developing superintelligence. I won't be shocked if it happens in the next five years, and I'd be surprised if it takes fifty years at current trajectories. I believe that if they get there, everyone will die. I want these labs to stop trying to make LLMs smarter.
But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I'm pretty bullish on AI progress. I'm aware that people have a lot of non-existential concerns about it. Some of those concerns are dumb (water use)1, but others are worth taking seriously (deepfakes, job loss). Overall I think it'll be good for the human race.
Again, that's aside from the bit where I expect AI to kill us all, which is an important bit.
The ostensible point of the march was trying to get Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to publicly support a "pause in principle" - to support a global pause on AI development backed by international treaty. I think this would be great! (Demis Hassabis has already said he would, though I think his exact words were "I think so" and I'd rather he be a bit more committed.) I think a global pause treaty would be bad for the economy (and through it, bad for the people who participate in the economy) and I don't like the level of government oversight I think it would require; but on the other hand, global human extinction would be pretty bad.
My point estimate is that about 300 people showed up. (80% CI… 200 to 500?) We started outside OpenAI HQ. My girlfriend and I were given orange-and-black placards (PauseAI colors) with messages we endorsed. ("Pause AI", "if you can't steer, don't race", "just don't build AGI until there's expert consensus it won't cause human extinction".) I think about half the placards were like that, a third were Pull the Plug branded (with "Pull the Plug", or with sad-looking electrical sockets and no text), and the rest were assorted individual ones. ("Fuck AI. Fuck it to death". A pig with the ChatGPT logo for a butthole. I'm pretty sure there were also ones I liked.)
A few of the organizers gave brief talks, then we walked to Meta. Two invited guests gave talks there, and we walked to DeepMind. One more talk, and off to Google proper. Two more talks. And then there was a people's assembly, more on that later.
I kinda liked the walking? It felt kinda good to be walking in a crowd of people where a bunch of them seemed to be on board with not committing suicide as a species.
Unfortunately, most of the speeches were frankly dumb. One speaker spent some time talking about how monopoly power is bad, and companies having a fiscal duty to shareholders is bad; since neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has a monopoly on cutting-edge AI or is publicly traded2, I'm not sure why she thought this was relevant. One speaker complained that new data centers were going to be powered by nuclear reactors, as if we're supposed to think nuclear power is a bad thing. One of the hosts repeatedly mentioned threats to children, women and young girls. This was the morning that Pete Hegseth had declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, but someone said that Anthropic had folded to their demands. The organizers can't be blamed for this one, but someone was handing out anti-designer-babies leaflets. (I am pro-designer-babies.)
Mostly I felt like the vibe was a sort of generic lefty anti-big-tech thing, which is not something I want to lend weight to. There were a few references to human extinction, and I liked the speech given by Maxine Fournes (global head of PauseAI), but I felt like the sensible stuff got overshadowed by the dumb.3
How did it turn into this? I don't have much sense of whether the attendees were mostly brought in by PauseAI or by Pull the Plug. But my guess would be that most of the speakers were organized by Pull the Plug or the other organizing groups (maybe one speaker each?), and speakers set the tone more than marginal attendees.
Should I hold my nose and join in anyway? I think it's important for different groups to be able to ally on points of common interest, even if they have deep enduring disagreements. But this didn't particularly feel like the other group was cooperating with me on that. And I'm not really a fan of uncomplicatedly supporting the lesser evil, even if the stakes are high. I don't know how to thread the needle between "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912? Die, heretic!" and "I don't like Kang, but at least he opposes Kodos". But I don't think I want to thread it here.
I could imagine myself feeling pretty differently about the whole thing in retrospect depending on the news coverage. If journalists cover this as being about extinction, then maybe I'll feel better about having attended. If they cover it as being about Billionaire Tech CEOs Bad (which I think it mostly was despite the stated purpose), I'll be kinda sad that I gave it a +1 with my presence. What I've seen so far: SWLondoner is surprisingly positive, MIT Technology Review is mixed.
I still feel broadly positive about PauseAI.4 I don't think they acted poorly here. I might go to another protest that they organize. But probably not if they jointly organize it with some other group I dislike.
My feelings about the chants I remember:
Occasionally there would be a call-and-response like, "do we want Bad Thing to happen? NO! Are we gonna stop it? YES!" I don't remember if I chimed in on the predictive claims about the future. I felt kinda conflicted about it if I did. I know we weren't really being asked to make snap predictive judgements about the future and all come to the same answer and yell it out simultaneously, and I don't think anyone's going to hold it against my Brier score if we fail to stop Bad Thing, but… I dunno. Autism. I endorse protest organizers continuing to use these calls-and-response until someone comes up with some better technology to do the thing they do.
At one point a few people crossed through the walking line, and one of them said "we're not counter-protesters, we're just crossing". I thought that was mildly funny and mildly confusing, because why would we have thought they were counterprotesters? A few moments later one of them said "they didn't find that funny" in a tone that sounded to me like they thought we were offended.
After the protest was a people's assembly. I think this bit was fully organized by Pull the Plug, and it's not the public facing bit of the event, so it's worth talking about separately from the protest.
The format of this part was that people sat in small groups around a dozen or so tables, and had a facilitated conversation about "what are our concerns about AI" and "what do we think should be done about it". Then each table picked someone to summarize our conversation for the room, some of whom noticed that no one was giving them "round it up please" hand gestures and took advantage of this fact. Finally someone summarized all those summaries.
The conversation at my table was pretty fine. Three of us were mostly worried about extinction, three were mostly worried about other things. In summary, extinction was the first thing mentioned out of a long list of things. (But it's not like I volunteered to summarize. And if I had done it, I would have felt like a dick giving extinction as much weight in summary as the rest combined, even if I think that was about representative for the table.)
Another table reported that the thing they could all agree on was, you know those annoying buttons like WhatsApp has where you can talk to an AI? They all agreed that people should be able to hide those buttons.
I mostly stopped listening after that. In the final summary, again, extinction was mentioned first but it was just one in a long list of things.
I think that summary is supposed to be fed to… some level of government somehow? Not sure. I did not come away from this experience thinking that people's assemblies are the future of intelligent governance.
I feel like I come across pretty snarky and conceited in this. I'm not gonna say "that's not me", because… well, I don't think I get to call lots of people dumb and expect readers not to infer that I'm the type of person who thinks lots of people are dumb.
I do think this is kind of out of distribution for my writing, and not how I want to usually write. But if I tried to write something more measured here, I think it would be less honest and I probably would never publish.
But also, this piece more than most of what I write is about me. I could say "I can see why you'd be tempted to chant CEOS, back in the basement! Techbros, back in the basement!, but I'm not a fan because…". But I think it's more important, here, to say that my reaction to it is "fuck you, assholes". If protest organizers want people like me to feel good about attending protests, they should know that that's my reaction to that chant.
In this piece I'm sharing my opinions, but I'm not trying to explain why I hold them and I'm not trying to convince anyone of them. I'm not carefully differentiating between opinions I hold confidently and opinions I'm less sure about. ↩
Yet! Growth mindset. (If she'd said that AI labs are trying to become publicly traded and this is bad because…, then I'd have rolled my eyes a lot less.) ↩
To be clear, even though I think "generic lefty anti-big-tech" is pretty dumb, that's not mostly about either the "lefty" or the "anti-big-tech". It's mostly about the "generic" bit. ↩
I haven't had much engagement with them as a group apart from this protest. I've met and liked Joseph, the UK director. And I consider Matilda, the UK deputy director, a friend. I shared this with her before publishing. ↩