Our guest in this episode is Holly Elmore, who is the Founder and Executive Director of PauseAI US. The website pauseai-us.org starts with this headline: “Our proposal is simple: Don’t build powerful AI systems until we know how to keep them safe. Pause AI.”

But PauseAI isn’t just a talking shop. They’re probably best known for organising public protests. The UK group has demonstrated in Parliament Square in London, with Big Ben in the background, and also outside the offices of Google DeepMind. A group of 30 PauseAI protesters gathered outside the OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco. Other protests have taken place in New York, Portland, Ottawa, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Stockholm, and Sydney, among other cities.

Previously, Holly was a researcher at the think tank Rethink Priorities in the area of Wild Animal Welfare. And before that, she studied evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department.

Selected follow-ups:

• Holly Elmore - substack
• PauseAI US
• PauseAI - global site
• Wild Animal Suffering... and why it matters
• Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia
• The Unproven (And Unprovable) Case For Net Wild Animal Suffering. A Reply To Tomasik - by Michael Plant
• Leading Evolution Compassionately - Herbivorize Predators
• David Pearce (philosopher) - Wikipedia
• The AI industry is racing toward a precipice - Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
• Nick Bostrom's new views regarding AI/AI safety - reddit
• AI is poised to remake the world; Help us ensure it benefits all of us - Future of Life Institute
• On being wrong about AI - by Scott Aharonson, on his previous suggestion that it might take "a few thousand years" to reach superhuman AI
• California Institute of Machine Consciousness - organisation founded by Joscha Bach
• Pausing AI is the only safe approach to digital sentience - article by Holly Elmore
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers - book by Geoffrey Moore

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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