"Thoughts on the Pause AI protest" by philh

On Saturday (Feb 28, 2026) I attended my first ever protest. It was jointly organized by PauseAI, Pull the Plug and a handful of other groups I forget. I have mixed feelings about it. To be clear about where I stand: I believe that AI labs are worryingly close to developing superintelligence. I won't be shocked if it happens in the next five years, and I'd be surprised if it takes fifty years at current trajectories. I believe that if they get there, everyone will die. I want these labs to stop trying to make LLMs smarter. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I'm pretty bullish on AI progress. I'm aware that people have a lot of non-existential concerns about it. Some of those concerns are dumb (water use)1, but others are worth taking seriously (deepfakes, job loss). Overall I think it'll be good for the human race. Again, that's aside from the bit where I expect AI to kill us all, which is an important bit. The ostensible point of the march was trying to get Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to publicly support a "pause in principle" - to support a global pause [...] The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z4jikoM4rnfB8fuKW/thoughts-on-the-pause-ai-protest --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.