An anti-AI activist in California has been missing for about two weeks, according to The Atlantic, and now his friends are scared for his safety while San Francisco police fear he could target OpenAI employees.
The activist in question, a 27 year old named Sam Kirchner, helped start the Stop AI group last year with a commitment to non-violent protest, but became frustrated and angry that the group’s efforts didn’t go quickly or far enough as he increasingly saw AI as a looming existential threat to humanity, according to the magazine’s reporting.
That eventually led to Kirchner splitting from the group and going off grid after assaulting the current Stop AI leader; city police then received calls that “warned that Kirchner had specifically threatened to buy high-powered weapons and to kill people at OpenAI,” The Atlantic reports.
Kirchner’s situation is clearly extreme, but perhaps not entirely surprising as AI rocks society, prompting doom-and-gloom narratives, even among its most ardent boosters like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“There is this kind of an apocalyptic mindset that people can get into,” Émile P. Torre — a philosopher, historian and acquaintance of Kirchner — told The Atlantic. “The stakes are enormous and literally couldn’t be higher. That sort of rhetoric is everywhere in Silicon Valley.”
Kirchner’s descent seems to have started last month when he had a confrontation with members of Stop AI, which is one of several AI skeptic organizations or loose confederations online that have sprung up in recent years. Stop AI’s mission is to push for a “permanent global ban on the development of artificial superintelligence,” The Atlantic reports.
Kirchner disagreed with Stop AI messaging for a protest and then beat up Matthew “Yakko” Hall, the current leader of the group, after Kirchner tried to access funds from Stop AI’s coffers. Members later found his West Oakland apartment empty and learned that the city police issued an internal alert about Kirchner being armed and dangerous and a possible threat to employees at OpenAI; its offices locked down last month as a result.
Stop AI members don’t think he’s a public danger and are more scared about his mental and physical health. Most likely, he’s hunkering down feeling hurt and embarrassed, they told the magazine. Nonetheless, some of his final words to Yakko were that the “nonviolence ship has sailed for me.”
“He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Stop AI organizer Wynd Kaufmyn told The Atlantic.
A more extreme example of an AI skeptic group is the Zizians, a cult that became fearful AI could end humanity and which has been implicated in several murders, though those cases have nothing to do with AI. Another is Pause AI, which “advocates for a pause in superintelligent-AI development until it can proceed safely, or in ‘alignment’ with democratically decided ideal outcomes.”
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