This last week 671 verified current employees of Google and OpenAI publicly coordinated across competing companies to jointly refuse specific Pentagon demands around autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance: https://notdivided.org
This kind of cross-company researcher solidarity is historically rare. The issue is that it's ephemeral and once the immediate pressure is gone, there's no structure left behind.
Given the issues facinf the field and our species, I would feel a lot safer if I knew that regular scientists and engineers, people I went to college with, were legally positioned to have a hand in governing how this is built. I dont trust Altman, Amodei or any of the rest of them, including the US government.
I'm a tech worker in Europe with connections to Tech Workers Coalition, and although not an AI researcher myself I've been feeling compelled to get off my aas and participate in seeding something more durable.
I was thinking of something like a transnational body that provides researchers with the ability to coordinate across companies, refuse specific applications without career destruction, and set professional ethics standards - even perhaps setting up unions in each country and fostering coordination between them.
This kind of cross-company researcher solidarity is historically rare. The issue is that it's ephemeral and once the immediate pressure is gone, there's no structure left behind.
Given the issues facinf the field and our species, I would feel a lot safer if I knew that regular scientists and engineers, people I went to college with, were legally positioned to have a hand in governing how this is built. I dont trust Altman, Amodei or any of the rest of them, including the US government.
I'm a tech worker in Europe with connections to Tech Workers Coalition, and although not an AI researcher myself I've been feeling compelled to get off my aas and participate in seeding something more durable.
I was thinking of something like a transnational body that provides researchers with the ability to coordinate across companies, refuse specific applications without career destruction, and set professional ethics standards - even perhaps setting up unions in each country and fostering coordination between them.
Am I reading the zeitgeist wrong?