LW - MIRI 2024 Communications Strategy by Gretta Duleba

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: MIRI 2024 Communications Strategy, published by Gretta Duleba on May 29, 2024 on LessWrong.
As we explained in our
MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy update, MIRI has pivoted to prioritize policy, communications, and technical governance research over technical alignment research. This follow-up post goes into detail about our communications strategy.
The Objective: Shut it Down[1]
Our objective is to convince major powers to shut down the development of frontier AI systems worldwide before it is too late. We believe that nothing less than this will prevent future misaligned smarter-than-human AI systems from destroying humanity. Persuading governments worldwide to take sufficiently drastic action will not be easy, but we believe this is the most viable path.
Policymakers deal mostly in compromise: they form coalitions by giving a little here to gain a little somewhere else. We are concerned that most legislation intended to keep humanity alive will go through the usual political processes and be ground down into ineffective compromises.
The only way we think we will get strong enough legislation is if policymakers actually get it, if they actually come to understand that building misaligned smarter-than-human systems will kill everyone, including their children. They will pass strong enough laws and enforce them if and only if they come to understand this central truth.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. AI labs continue to invest in developing and training more powerful systems. We do not seem to be close to getting the sweeping legislation we need. So while we lay the groundwork for helping humanity to wake up, we also have a less dramatic request. We ask that governments and AI labs install the "off-switch"[2] so that if, on some future day, they decide to shut it all down, they will be able to do so.
We want humanity to wake up and take AI x-risk seriously. We do not want to shift the Overton window, we want to shatter it.
Theory of Change
Now I'll get into the details of how we'll go about achieving our objective, and why we believe this is the way to do it. The facets I'll consider are:
Audience: To whom are we speaking?
Message and tone: How do we sound when we speak?
Channels: How do we reach our audience?
Artifacts: What, concretely, are we planning to produce?
Audience
The main audience we want to reach is policymakers - the people in a position to enact the sweeping regulation and policy we want - and their staff.
However, narrowly targeting policymakers is expensive and probably insufficient. Some of them lack the background to be able to verify or even reason deeply about our claims. We must also reach at least some of the people policymakers turn to for advice. We are hopeful about reaching a subset of policy advisors who have the skill of thinking clearly and carefully about risk, particularly those with experience in national security.
While we would love to reach the broader class of bureaucratically-legible "AI experts," we don't expect to convince a supermajority of that class, nor do we think this is a requirement.
We also need to reach the general public. Policymakers, especially elected ones, want to please their constituents, and the more the general public calls for regulation, the more likely that regulation becomes. Even if the specific measures we want are not universally popular, we think it helps a lot to have them in play, in the Overton window.
Most of the content we produce for these three audiences will be fairly basic, 101-level material. However, we don't want to abandon our efforts to reach deeply technical people as well. They are our biggest advocates, most deeply persuaded, most likely to convince others, and least likely to be swayed by charismatic campaigns in the opposite direction. And more importantly, discussions with very tech...