A New Hope
From Downing Street to Cardiff, support for humanity is growing
Welcome to the latest edition of the ControlAI newsletter! Although the news cycle can feel dominated by grave warnings about AI’s rapid progress, we want to pierce the gloom.
We’re seeing more recognition of AI safety concerns from politicians, journalists, and the general public.
ControlAI itself continues to go from strength to strength, and today we’re excited to share updates with you from our fight to keep humanity in control!
Our Campaign is Growing
Our UK campaign for binding regulation on the most powerful AI systems is continuing to grow.
We now have 37 UK politicians backing us. This is the first time such a coalition of parliamentarians has acknowledged the extinction threat from AI.
Assembling this coalition is a significant milestone on the path to getting dangerous AI development under control, and we’re only continuing to grow it!
Our campaign statement reads:
Nobel Prize winners, AI scientists, and CEOs of leading AI companies have stated that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.
Specialised AIs - such as those advancing science and medicine - boost growth, innovation, and public services. Superintelligent AI systems would compromise national and global security.
The UK can secure the benefits and mitigate the risks of AI by delivering on its promise to introduce binding regulation on the most powerful AI systems.
We also have a similar open statement that members of the public can sign. So far, over 40,000 have done so.
The success of our campaign is not down to any complex political manoeuvrings or 3D chess, but to the hard work of our team who’ve straightforwardly made the case to politicians about the extinction risk from AI and why we need to regulate powerful AI systems.
Our team has now done this in meetings with over 100 politicians in the UK and US. After just a preliminary meeting, more than one in three politicians back the campaign.
The Direct Institutional Plan
This is all part of the Direct Institutional Plan (DIP), our plan for how to keep humanity in control.
The DIP is a simple plan for civic engagement that any person or organization can implement independently, and collaboratively.
AI threatens humanity with extinction, and this has been warned of by Nobel Prize winners, hundreds of top AI scientists and even the CEOs of the leading AI companies themselves.
Directly engaging institutions is the obvious, straightforward path to get necessary policies in place. Everyone can help keep humanity in control.
The DIP has two straightforward steps:
Design policies that target the development of superintelligence and precursor technologies.
Inform every relevant person in the democratic process and convince them to take a stance on this issue.
We have resources on our website, including detailed policy briefs in order to help anyone who wants to implement the DIP.
What We Learned from Briefing 70+ Lawmakers on the Threat from AI
And we’ve just added a new resource!
has written up her reflections briefing 70+ UK politicians on the threat from AI. We expect this to be an extremely useful resource for individuals and organizations implementing the Direct Institutional Plan, and to serve as an excellent guide for how to talk to politicians.
Leticia’s piece has received an overwhelmingly positive response, and has led to people from several different countries reaching out to encourage us and ask how they can replicate our work.
In particular, CeSIA’s Executive Director, Charbel-Raphaël Segerie, mentioned in a comment on Leticia’s LessWrong post that they’re seriously considering testing the DIP in France and Europe:
We need to scale this massively. CeSIA is seriously considering to test the Direct Institutional Plan in France and in Europe.
From Downing Street to Cardiff
So far, our team has briefed over 100 politicians in the UK and US.
As part of our engagement efforts, Mathias Kirk Bonde and Leticia Garcia visited the Prime Minister's office in April, where they presented on the extinction threat from AI and the kinds of policies necessary to actually tackle the problem.
The following month, Mathias and Leticia were invited to address members of the Welsh Senedd, bringing these important discussions on AI extinction risk and policy responses along with them.
Video Collaborations
We’ve also been succeeding in our outreach with the public!
Last month, we made two amazing new videos in collaboration with YouTube creators.
What happens if AI just keeps getting smarter?
This beautiful and compelling video we made with Rational Animations walks through how humanity is on track to develop artificial superintelligence by default. This poses grave risks to humanity, including a threat of extinction. It explains the progression from today's chatbots to machines that could become smarter than every human on the planet combined.
But our core message is one of hope: this dangerous default path is entirely preventable.
This 17-Second Trick Could Stop AI From Killing You
Created in partnership with Siliconversations, here we explain exactly what you can do to help prevent AI from wiping us out.
These have been amazingly well received, with the Rational Animations video netting over 800,000 views in the month since it was uploaded, and continuing to grow!
The Siliconversations video has gotten 50k views in the first 6 days — both videos are massively beating expectations and are outperforming channel averages too! Humanity wants to win!
We have more on the way! We’re reaching out to many more YouTube channels, and have had conversations with channels collectively representing 69 million subscribers.
We also recently launched a podcast! You can find the first episode here:
You!
There are now almost 50,000 of you subscribed to our mailing list, and you’ve been doing great work too!
It’s so important that politicians are informed about the risks of AI and the need to regulate powerful AI systems. As part of making this happen, we built contact tools that make contacting your elected representatives super quick and easy. We’ve previously written that it takes less than a minute, but we have a new record from Siliconversations: 17 seconds! That’s all it takes to let your representatives know you care about ensuring that AI is developed safely.
So far, over 1,000 of you have used our UK tool to contact your MP!
And from using our US tool, US senators have received over 5,000 messages from constituents about the danger of AI and the need to regulate it!
You can find our tools here: https://controlai.com/take-action
It only takes 17 seconds to help make a difference!
Our Research
We’d also like to use this opportunity to draw your attention to our core research pieces.
A Narrow Path is our comprehensive policy plan to ensure the survival and flourishing of humanity against the threat of artificial superintelligence.
The Compendium is an excellent guide that explains why artificial general intelligence poses an extinction risk to humanity, how we got here, why this problem is urgent and hard, and what humanity can do about it.
We are also working on legislation to regulate superintelligent AI systems and prevent their precursor technologies in both the UK and the US, hopefully we’ll be able to share news on this soon!
This is all to say the good fight is being fought. Despite the feeling of doom that AI development can create, ControlAI is committed to keeping humanity in control and optimistic in our continued success.