The specific ones I was involved in? Pretty sure they didn’t. They were SOPA related and related to what people thought was a corrupt construction of a train station in my hometown. I don’t think there was much organizing for either of these before they took off. I knew some of the core organizers, they did not create many small protests before this.
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 I don’t think these examples seem well-described as not having precedents / lots of societal and cultural preconditions (e.g. you probably would not have seen mass protests against the train station without a long history of environmental protests in Southern Germany).
but I don’t think these examples seem well-described as not having precedents / lots of societal and cultural preconditions
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).
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.
The specific ones I was involved in? Pretty sure they didn’t. They were SOPA related and related to what people thought was a corrupt construction of a train station in my hometown. I don’t think there was much organizing for either of these before they took off. I knew some of the core organizers, they did not create many small protests before this.
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 I don’t think these examples seem well-described as not having precedents / lots of societal and cultural preconditions (e.g. you probably would not have seen mass protests against the train station without a long history of environmental protests in Southern Germany).
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).
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.