Hi comrades! I’ve been trying to transition into doing work around AI safety lately after having spent some time in an AI safety club in university. Mainstream AI Safety and tech policy spaces have a strong liberal bias, and so after being tired of seeing article after article rehashing proposed solutions to the dangers of AI (most of which would be solved under socialism if we’re being honest), I’ve decided that I would like to change that by creating a socialist alternative.
To that end, with AI assistance, I’ve written a few documents attempting to hash out a vision for an anti-imperialist and socialist organization focused on studying the effects that AI has on society and political economy. It’s taken me many hours to write (honestly the main reason why I resorted to using AI assistance since it was taking WAY longer than I had anticipated when I first started writing lol) and I didn’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so there are some mistakes in the documents for sure.
Feel free to give me feedback on any of the documents or let me know if you are interested in collaborating! Also, if anyone knows of an organization that is already doing this that is principled, let me know. It would be better to support existing organizations, but I don’t want to support ones that have takes like “China is just another capitalist imperialist power like the US” like what I’ve seen in some organizations that I’ve found when searching online.
AI Safety Organization Proposal
Edit: I’m thinking of sending the email out to BlueDot first, so if you come across this and only have time to focus on some of the files for now, please focus on the email and also the critique file. I’m not expecting there to be that enthusiastic of a response from them anyways, but I thought that I’d at least give them a shot to respond to my criticism before writing them off and doing my own thing
now that i think of it, doesn’t the EFF sort of do this? they are activists doing all sorts of stuff related to technology, ai, privacy and such. they imply a leftist lean and afaik aren’t really anti-imperialists, they are also much smaller than WAICO in scope. could be someone else to learn a couple of tricks from though.
we desperately need to bring these conversations to not-computer-nerd leftists, and not just AI. technology sadly contains the new public squares, and we are still trying to play the oligarch’s game individually and atomized on their platforms. we could “easily” be a much more integrated worldwide coordinated effort just like theirs, and i hate wasting this potential.
i’m not very savvy on the details of founding such an org at all, but i like everything that goes in that direction.
Yeah I guess I didn’t quite think about EFF but I guess there are definitely some things to learn from them. I always was under the impression that they were more libertarian than anything regardless if it meant libertarian left or libertarian right, but ultimately any move towards decentralized networks makes it easier for us to organize (as in more independence from big tech, not necessarily a bunch of disparate platforms)
I was honestly hoping to get a lot of people interested in AI safety and radicalize them that way or find like minded people to join. I’m not sure how familiar you are with the AI safety community, but from my understanding there is a LOT of potential for radicalization. The amount of times that people independently come to the conclusion that the profit motive is a big barrier is honestly quite pleasantly surprising from normies. However, they just can’t find a solution since they can’t see past capitalism. I still consider myself a baby ML in a lot of ways, but talking to people who spin their wheels around trying to make capitalism and safe AI compatible has only made me even more convinced that socialism is the right answer.
Honestly if you have ideas in getting others on the left to be more on board, I’m all ears! I think we have one of the most opportune moments to positively influence what is likely to be the most influential technology in this generation. Even if we can just get minor concessions from the ruling class, that would be more than worth it. We don’t even need to start that big, just something like a reading or discussion group or something for now
yeah, and the brain scrambling effects, the total surveillance, the planet consuming aspect, the threat to our access to free information are all conspiracy sounding they-are-fooling-us rhetoric that is usually made so seductive for people in the first place. i feel we just talk about this wrong.
you said it yourself though, we are in a discussion group. would the community of laymen leftists here want to see more of it? maybe provoke a bit of discussion? we have some of these over at my instance but feels like everyone is at somewhat of a loss on what a possible next step could look like. it doesn’t help that this is a bit unprecedented.
Yeah, honestly I will have to think about this a bit more and try to engage with others to see how to proceed. I talked with some of the organizers behind Safe AI Philippines about field building, and it definitely is difficult to get folks to engage given how new it all is.
I’m also going to look at some of the other organizations like All Tech Is Human to see how they do it as well, and maybe reach out to some of the organizations that do research in political economy in general, and see if they would be interested in doing work in AI’s relationship to political economy.