As AI grows, so does the desperation of those attempting to prevent it.
Concerned about AI’s potential to endanger humans, two men are now on a hunger strike outside of DeepMind and Anthropic’s offices.
On Sunday, 45-year-old activist Guido Reichstadter began a week of protesting without food. According to Reichstadter, he intends to stay until the organization addresses his worries on the course of AI development.
He is urging Anthropic’s management, directors, and staff to immediately cease their irresponsible acts that are destroying our society and try to repair the damage that has already been done, he stated in a post on LessWrong, an online debate forum.
Despite warnings about the rapid advancement of AI from Geoffrey Hinton to Elon Musk, businesses are vying for the creation of artificial general intelligence, a theoretical version of AI that can reason just as well as humans. According to Hinton’s latest statement on the “One Decision” podcast, “I believe that many individuals in large corporations are publicly downplaying the risk.”
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has personally warned of the possibility of white-collar job losses. He stated at a May developer conference that “AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years.”
“As the creators of this technology, it is our responsibility to be forthright about what lies ahead. Later, Amodei told Axios, “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”
“In that letter, I asked him to stop developing that technology and to do everything in his power to stop the race that he’s participating in,” he said. “I told him I’d be out here in front of his office waiting for his answer.”
He stated that he would rely on water, electrolytes, and multivitamins to sustain himself till that time.
All of the frontier laboratories are working as fast as they can to completely generalize superhuman systems in the tangible reality we currently inhabit. He replied that’s what must end. He believes that with relatively constrained systems that don’t have the same hazards, tremendous things may be accomplished.
After a 15-day hunger strike outside the Miami mayor’s office in 2022 to raise awareness of the climate issue, Reichstadter stated he felt like he could have continued. This time, he claimed to be “feeling good” thus far.
Reichstadter founded Stop AI, a nonviolent civil resistance group that aims to permanently prohibit the advancement of artificial superintelligence (ASI) in order to avert widespread job loss, human extinction, and several other issues.
Prior to this, he had been detained for chaining the doors of OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters. This month, he added, he will go to trial.
Others have been inspired by Reichstadter. For three days, 29-year-old French former AI safety researcher Michael Trazzi has been demonstrating outside DeepMind’s London offices without food.
According to Trazzi, he studied artificial intelligence and computer science in Paris and AI safety at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute before it closed in April 2024. He used to work as a software and AI developer, and now he makes short videos about AI policy on YouTube Shorts and TikTok.
Trazzi is also worried about how quickly AI is developing. Change might be facilitated by collaborative pressure on AI leaders to make public remarks.
He said, “To be specific, I want Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind and a pioneer in the field of general intelligence, to state that he would not release any further frontier models if the other frontier AI laboratories stopped doing the same. A halt may be coordinated globally if enough of those leaders openly state it.”
