All of Johannes Ackva's Comments + Replies

Thanks for clarifying, I can see that.

I think my model is more "if there's an incident that increases the salience of AI x risk concerns, then an existing social movement structure that can catalyze this will be very valuable" which is different from assuming that Pause AI by itself will drive that.

 

In a similar way then, say, after Fukushima in Germany the existence of a strong environmental movement facilitated mass protests whereas in other countries ~nothing happened despite objectively the same external shock.

Assuming the second refers to "Stuttgart 21"?

I think both of these examples might have been for novel concerns in their specifics (e.g. a specific new train station project), but there is a lot of precedent for this kind of process as well as a strong existing civil society doing this kind of protest (e.g. a long history of environmentalist and mass protests against large new infrastructure projects).

Maybe this is also true for AI risk (e.g. maybe it fits neatly into other forms of anti-tech sentiment and could "spontaneously" generate mass protests), but ... (read more)

4habryka
Yep!  I totally think there are lots of cultural preconditions and precedents, I just think they mostly don't look like "small protests for many years that gradually or even suddenly grew into larger ones". My best guess is if you see a protest movement not have substantial growth for many months, it's unlikely to start growing, and it's not that valuable to have started it earlier (and somewhat likely to have a bit of an inoculation effect, though I also don't think that effect is that big).