A few months ago, I gave a speech at the US Capitol on NASA, the so-called "inevitability" of AI, the need for a treaty banning superintelligence, and a future worth fighting for. felixdesimone.substack.com/p…

Want to do something about the threat posed by superintelligent AI? Apply to join ControlAI's team! We're hiring a Policy Advisor to work closely with me briefing members of Congress. This role is DC-based and ideal for someone with national security or Hill experience...

Welcome to California, where if you want to build a high-speed rail system, you'll be stymied by bureaucrats and delayed by decades, but if you want to build radically superhuman AI that threatens to eat the world, you can apparently do so with impunity.

Incredibly gratifying to witness most normal people able to immediately see right through Jensen Huang's BS. It's also a nice reminder that Pro-AI Twitter is a bubble, and that the general public is significantly more sour on AI. Mountains of polling data back this up!

"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." - John F. Kennedy, June 1963 Months later, the US and USSR signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americ…

Please call your members of Congress and ask them to cosponsor the Ban Superintelligence Act. ESPECIALLY if you have Republican members of Congress-- a Republican cosponsor would be worth their weight in gold. You can use @pauseaius tool to call Congress: pauseai-us.org/bansuperintel…

Remember when superhuman AI was still a distant hypothetical, and people debated over how dangerous an "ASI in a box" would be and if it would be able to use super-persuasion to convince us to connect it to the internet? Of course, the underlying assumption people had at the time was that nobody would be so stupid as to connect a powerful AI to the internet (or other dangerous systems) by default. Boy, we sure showed them.

I've seen the anti-regulation advocates go from "we can't regulate AI, it's too early, don't stifle innovation prematurely!" (2024) to "we can't regulate AI, it's already too late, the genie is out of the bottle!" (2026) I didn't buy their excuses then and I don't buy them now.

This broke a piece of my heart. I'm not a mathematician, but I did seriously consider pursuing a career in astrophysics, and I can foresee my physicist friends saying similar things next year. The idea that our noble scientific pursuit, of plumbing the depths of the universe and glimpsing its secrets, could soon be taken away from us entirely, with no human beings in the loop, fills me with a deep melancholy. None of us asked for this.

Fitting that the home of the great Alan Turing might lead the world on keeping us safe from superhuman AI. Turing understood the perils of recursive self-improvement (AIs building better AIs, leading to a loss of human control). He had this to say in 1951.

Excellent news!! The international coalition for AI sanity grows stronger every day.🌍

JUST IN: Cigarette manufacturer declares there is a "0% chance" that cigarettes cause lung cancer.

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." - Gustav Mahler

0. The core disagreement was about the inevitability of a race 1. I think leadership is way too paranoid about China and the US government. They don’t believe it will be possible to negotiate. 2. They largely initiated the recent race to RSI, because of a belief in its inevitability. Note that OpenAI had to shed a bunch of dead weight like Sora because Anthropic was going for the jugular. 3. Even if they are **not** being pessimistic, I disagree with their consequentialist philosophy. If the race is inevitable you should not contribute.

As a lifelong Michigander, I am so heartened to see both candidates in an otherwise charged and contested race calling for a slowdown/pause on AI development. This is exactly the kind of bipartisan "race to the top" that, if repeated across the country, will keep humanity safe.

I am trying very hard not to get my hopes up, but I'm feeling more optimistic right now than at any other point in the last 3+ years. So many people are waking up, so quickly. This might be what a surviving world looks like. But we have to keep pushing.

Dear politicians: I have many deeply held political beliefs, but I will be a single-issue voter in the next election. That issue is the continued survival of my family. I will vote for whichever candidate pledges to ban superhuman AI and negotiate an emergency AI treaty with China, even if I disagree with them on literally everything else. By 2028-- if we're not past the point of no return by then-- I am confident that there will be millions of voters like me in both parties. Politicians, act accordingly.

Reminder for everyone to please meet with your Republican members of Congress, talk to your conservative friends, write to right-wing media outlets, etc. The campaign to ban superhuman AI is still bipartisan, but if that window closes, we are cooked. nitter.net/FelixDeSimone/status/2…

If you're just hearing about how AI might soon wipe out humanity, it's important to understand how we got to this point. It's pretty simple: - A small group of prescient people realized this would be a problem. - But most of the people in a position to do something about it didn't hear about it, or didn't take it seriously because it sounded "too sci-fi." - Even as more and more people began to take it seriously, many people lied or downplayed their concerns for fear of looking silly or harming their careers. - By the time the world's leading AI scientists were openly voicing their concerns, AI companies were immensely powerful, and they hired lobbyists and PR people to mislead policymakers and the public about the risk. - As a result, policymakers accepted false solutions, like voluntary safety testing and other forms of self-regulation. So what's the situation now? - People are still downplaying their concerns. - The leading AI companies are telling us again that the next step is more self-regulation. It's still a terrible idea, and we can't keep wasting time on such things. - Many are suggesting we regulate AI to ensure that it's built safely, but we don't actually know how to build AI safely. The actual solution is to stop building more powerful AI. - Many people have realized this recently, but we may still need a sustained campaign of political organizing to make sure that we actually get this solution before it's too late.