In my previous post in this sequence, I made a fundraising pitch for my organization, the Center for AI Policy (CAIP), asking readers to donate to us so we can continue lobbying Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation.

Here, in the second post, I want to zoom out from CAIP's particular concerns and argue that the AI safety movement as a whole should be investing far more resources into “political advertising.” We need to seek out individual politicians and personally let them know about the risk from misaligned superintelligence and show them what they can do to mitigate that risk.

The core of my argument for this second post is that AI governance ideas are not self-enacting: even the best policy ideas need political champions, or they will not become law. Therefore, to win at AI governance, we have to actively promote and advertise our ideas to political [...]

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Outline:

(01:48) Good Technical Alignment Ideas Might Spread Automatically

(03:35) Good AI Governance Ideas Won't Spread Automatically

(05:59) Spreading AI Governance Ideas Requires Overcoming Political Opposition

(09:55) Spreading AI Governance Ideas Requires Overcoming Political Inertia

(13:55) Earning the Chance to Persuade

(16:19) We Either Solve Bad Incentives, or We Probably Die

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First published:
May 21st, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BaigpPyZpkZuSjmAz/the-need-for-political-advertising-post-2-of-6-on-ai

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“The Need for Political Advertising (Post 2 of 6 on AI Governance)” by Mass_Driver 22:52 Share

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“The Need for Political Advertising (Post 2 of 6 on AI Governance)” by Mass_Driver