How Scientists Can Shape Public Opinion Over A.I. Risks

Depending on your feelings about artificial intelligence, the Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s resignation this month could be interpreted as a courageous act of truth-telling, an outburst of sci-fi-addled alarmism or an elaborate media stunt.But to Coxon himself, it was clearly at least one more thing: a plea for labor action.“If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like,” Coxon wrote, after disclosing that he and many of his former colleagues believe A.I.could extinguish humanity.

“Should you put your head down because ‘it’s happening anyway’ — or take this moment to call for different conditions?”Coxon and the A.I.researchers who echoed his plea on social media seemed to be making a simple calculation.

That if anyone’s going to save our species from the uncomfortably high risk of apocalypse, it’s not going to be A.I.executives or investors or the Trump administration — all of whom generally want to speed up development rather than slow it down.

To the extent there’s likely to be a savior, Coxon seems to believe, it’s going to be the workers.It’s not a crazy idea.Only so many people have the technical skills to push the A.I.

frontier forward.Their scientific knowledge makes them uniquely credible when cataloging the technology’s dangers.

And their relative scarcity gives them considerable bargaining power, at least in the short-term.If they decided en masse to stop building A.I.

tomorrow, research at the leading labs could largely stall out.That makes for a highly specific form of influence that can be used for the public good.Many have already tried.

Researchers at prominent A.I.labs have signed letters urging steps to promote safety in recent months and joined an amicus brief in a related legal case.

One group, the Coalition of Concerned AI Staff, came together in February as a way for researchers to share their A.I.anxieties and compare notes on how to limit its pe...