AI fever might have an iron grip on Fortune 500 CEOs, Wall Street traders, and government officials, but there are still some out their immune to the tech industry's charms.
For evidence, look no further than activist and organizer Guido Reichstadter, who's currently running on day three of a hunger strike on the front steps of the headquarters of the AI giant Anthropic.
In a statement posted to LessWrong — a forum kickstarted in 2009 by AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky — Reichstadter explained that AI is "being used to inflict serious harm on our society today and threaten to inflict increasingly greater damage tomorrow."
"Experts are warning us that this race to ever more powerful artificial general intelligence [AGI] puts our lives and well being at risk, as well as the lives and well being of our loved ones," Reichstadter said, referencing the tech industry's stated goal of creating an AI system with cognitive abilities matching — or vastly exceeding — that of a human.
"The AI companies' race is rapidly driving us to a point of no return," he continued. "This race must stop now, and it is the responsibility of all of us to make sure that it does."
Indeed, policy and tech scholars have cautioned that AGI is likely decades away from becoming a reality, if it ever arrives at all. Instead, they argue that raising the specter of a Cold War-style "race to AGI" is a calculated campaign by multi-billion dollar tech giants to keep investors on the hook, scare regulators into submission, and secure lucrative defense contracts from military bureaucrats.
Reichstadter previously took part in a 28 hour sit-in on top of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in DC to protest the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
The father of two is taking on the protest as part of the activist group StopAI. In his statement, Reichstadter calls on Anthropic's management, directors, and employees to "immediately stop their reckless actions which are harming our society and to work to remediate the harm that has already been called."
"We are in an emergency," he concluded. "Let us act as if this emergency is real."
Though the activist seems to be undergoing his hunger strike alone, he's not the only one protesting against AI development. Recently, a number of political organizations have sprouted up to challenge the AI industry or track its harms, such as the AI Incident Database or StopGenAI, not to be confused with Reichstadter's StopAI group.
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