AI fever might have an iron grip on Fortune 500 CEOs, Wall Street traders, and government officials, but there are still some out their immune to the tech industry’s charms.
For evidence, look no further than activist and organizer Guido Reichstadter, who’s currently running on day three of a hunger strike on the front steps of the headquarters of the AI giant Anthropic.
In a statement posted to LessWrong — a forum kickstarted in 2009 by AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky — Reichstadter explained that AI is “being used to inflict serious harm on our society today and threaten to inflict increasingly greater damage tomorrow.”
“Experts are warning us that this race to ever more powerful artificial general intelligence [AGI] puts our lives and well being at risk, as well as the lives and well being of our loved ones,” Reichstadter said, referencing the tech industry’s stated goal of creating an AI system with cognitive abilities matching — or vastly exceeding — that of a human.
“The AI companies’ race is rapidly driving us to a point of no return,” he continued. “This race must stop now, and it is the responsibility of all of us to make sure that it does.”
Indeed, policy and tech scholars have cautioned that AGI is likely decades away from becoming a reality, if it ever arrives at all. Instead, they argue that raising the specter of a Cold War-style “race to AGI” is a calculated campaign by multi-billion dollar tech giants to keep investors on the hook, scare regulators into submission, and secure lucrative defense contracts from military bureaucrats.
Reichstadter previously took part in a 28 hour sit-in on top of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in DC to protest the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
The father of two is taking on the protest as part of the activist group StopAI. In his statement, Reichstadter calls on Anthropic’s management, directors, and employees to “immediately stop their reckless actions which are harming our society and to work to remediate the harm that has already been called.”
“We are in an emergency,” he concluded. “Let us act as if this emergency is real.”
Though the activist seems to be undergoing his hunger strike alone, he’s not the only one protesting against AI development. Recently, a number of political organizations have sprouted up to challenge the AI industry or track its harms, such as the AI Incident Database or StopGenAI, not to be confused with Reichstadter’s StopAI group.
Kim Crawley, a cybersecurity researcher and professor at the Open Institute of Technology, founded StopGenAI out of a similar sense of responsibility to Reichstadter’s.
A grassroots political organization working to mitigate the harms caused by generative AI — the software giving rise to the digital slop that’s taking over the internet — StopGenAI’s current campaign is focused on “financially supporting people GenAI has made poor, and also on educating the general public about why they should avoid GenAI, and how they can do it.”
In seeking to develop AGI as a commercial enterprise, Crawley told Futurism, tech billionaires intend to “eliminate paying humans for our thinking labor.”
Sure enough, tech CEOs from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang to OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been almost giddy at the idea of AI replacing human jobs. It’s something AI marketing consultant Elijah Clark says he gets “extremely excited” about.
For Crawley and her coalition of activists, the threat is existential.
“We have the ability to fully provide for all eight billion people on the planet,” Crawley notes. “The computer technology we already had by the 1990s and 2000s massively increased worker productivity, but meanwhile the capitalists decided to give us an even smaller cut of the fruits of our labor. Now with GenAI, they want to eliminate paying humans altogether.”
More on Anthropic: CEO of Anthropic Warns That AI Will Destroy Huge Proportion of Well-Paying Jobs