A future worth fighting for
My speech at PauseAI US' protest on Capitol Hill
Context: On April 13, PauseAI US hosted a rally in front of the Capitol Building with close to 100 participants. This rally was held in conjunction with PauseCon DC, which saw dozens of citizen advocates from 18 states meet with their Congressional representatives in support of an international treaty to pause AI development. When I spoke at this protest, my message was clear: Enough is enough. Time to treat the extinction-level threat of AI with the urgency it demands. We have a future worth fighting for.
Friends and fellow human beings, thank you all for being here. We’re gathered here today to share our stories, to warn the world, and to demand action from our leaders. Our story is the human story, our fight is the fight for humanity. We’re just getting started, and we’re not going anywhere until our species is safe.
So, why am I here?
My name is Felix De Simone, and I’m the Organizing Director of PauseAI US. I’m also a giant space nerd. If I weren’t here, I’d be somewhere in the mountains with my telescope. I think about the human story in this context, knowing that, if we can only get our act together here on Earth, we will one day touch the stars. When the crew of Artemis launched toward the moon, I shed a tear of joy. When they splashed down safely in the Pacific, I breathed a sigh of relief. Look at what we’re capable of.
[Pictured: the crescent Earth from NASA’s livestream of the Artemis II mission.]
NASA’s achievements are humanity’s finest. At the base of these achievements is a culture of innovation met with safety – these two words are not antonyms, no matter what the AI industry tells us. Each part on a NASA rocket is meticulously inspected, each launch exactly orchestrated, each orbital maneuver planned to the finest detail. We understand how spaceships work, and how to make them safe, and with this understanding we have pierced the heavens.
Imagine what would happen if NASA started building rockets that they couldn’t steer, with a 20% chance of blowing up, strapping men and women to those rockets, and firing them haphazardly. The outcry would be vast, even the most enthusiastic space advocates would be appalled, and the world would demand answers.
Yet this is exactly what the world’s leading AI companies are doing right now. Only instead of launching rockets, their testing ground is Spaceship Earth.
We are so used to the warnings by now that they begin to blur together. The industry executives actively trying to build superintelligent AI routinely admit there’s a double-digit percentage chance their product could destroy humanity. If anything, they’re the optimistic ones. Whistleblowers who have fled these companies in terror inform us that it’s even worse on the inside than we know. Nobel Prize winners, hundreds of top AI researchers, and the inventors of modern AI themselves all tell us that we’re racing off the edge of a cliff. Our world is in peril.
What right do the AI companies have to gamble with our lives? What right have they to hold us hostage in this sick experiment, this species-wide game of Russian Roulette? What right has our government to ignore these threats, to endanger their constituents, to plug their ears with industry money as we hurtle toward the abyss?
Enough is enough.
There is no other context– in science, in engineering, in medicine– where this kind of risk would be tolerated. Yet the builders of superhuman AI have spun up their excuses. They tell us their hands are tied. If we don’t build the doomsday device, they say, our enemies will.
What they fail to realize is that this is a race with no winners. It doesn’t matter who builds superintelligent AI first– the outcome will be the same. Our species has come this far because of our intelligence. If we create machines vastly more intelligent than ourselves, machines that can outsmart us, machines that we can’t control, then that’s a wrap on the human experiment.
Looking at those images from Artemis, of the crescent Earth hanging in an icy black void, reminds us of our frailty. We cling to life on the skin of this precious marble. On it are a hundred millennia of human history– lovers dancing under the stars, mothers hugging their children, songs sung around the campfire on a cold winter’s night. We cannot risk losing it all.
Never let anyone tell you that superintelligence is inevitable. “Inevitability” is a coward’s retort, the last refuge of those with no moral leg to stand on. If superhuman AI were truly inevitable, the AI lobby would not be spending millions of dollars trying to crush regulation. They know how tenuous their position is. The game has not yet been played out. The human race can still win.
Besides, we’ve been here before. We’ve come close many times to the point of no return– and each time, cooler heads prevailed. In the 1960s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we agreed with the Soviets to ban aboveground nuclear testing. In the 1980s, after Carl Sagan and his colleagues warned of nuclear winter, we negotiated a ban on intermediate range nuclear missiles. Peace triumphed over recklessness, and we lived to see another day. Again and again, we’ve proven that we can work with our adversaries if the alternative is armageddon.
We face the same choice today. We can find a way out of this race with no winners. We can negotiate a deal with China, to ban superintelligent AI that imperils the world. We can choose sanity over shortsightedness. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.
Will we, driven mad by the illusion of dominance, race headlong toward oblivion? Or will we listen to our forebears, those diplomats who brought us time and again away from the brink, and work once more to keep the human story alive? It’s up to us.
We’re not here today because we want to be– we’re here because we have to be, because we have a moral duty to ourselves and our descendants. Because if we have grandchildren one day, they’ll ask us where we were in those fateful years that our future was written.
And we’re here with a clear message to our political leaders: Do your jobs. Protect your constituents. Prevent superintelligence from ravaging the world. Negotiate a treaty. Keep the future human.
We humans are capable of greatness. If we navigate the perilous waters ahead, the clouds will break, the sky will clear, and we will reach new and distant shores. But it all starts with our getting this right. It starts with our demanding action. It starts with each of us standing tall, holding our government accountable, and turning this big, messy ship around.
It starts with YOU.