I’d be pretty happy if we lived in a world where in every reasonably sized city in the US (and perhaps more widely) there was one (or more) local regular dinners where people talked about AI. Not meetup groups, though those seem maybe good, too. Dinners, in someone’s home, run by nice people, ideally potluck or otherwise home-cooked, where they invite friends, family, and people they run into on the street, to just talk about AI, perhaps with guides or what to talk about or financial support, perhaps not.

I think (though haven’t deeply researched) that this kind of thing has been responsible for quite a lot of political change. Most famously feminist consciousness-raising groups where small groups of women met in living rooms, often weekly, and took turns talking about their own lives on a chosen topic, which is where we get “the personal is political.” Moishe House and other groups fund people to run Shabbat dinners, just so more Jewish community can happen (this doesn't aim to or succeeed in leading to political action). Other examples Claude pulled below , with counterarguments below.

And I think it solves a lot of problems at once. What can any person do? Host a dinner. People are scared and uncertain, and they’d benefit from talking to other people. People are lonely, and would benefit from talking to their friends and neighbors in person, without phones or the internet mediating. What does the world need? People to wake up and demand something different from their elected officials [1] . People will take more actions, and identify more with doing something about AI, if they have social ties built around it. And it speaks to the moment: this is happening to all of us, and we’re all in it together. I’ll admit it also just kind of feels like the kind of thing that would be happening in a sane world.

I also think it could turn into some pretty good stuff: showing up at presidential town halls, calling reps, making Minneapolis (or whatever) the proud “Don’t Build Superintelligence” city.

Here’s what we’d do if we believed the above:

Overall, I’m not sure about this, but I feel reasonably excited about it.

Doug McAdam found that what predicted who actually showed up to Freedom Summer was mostly social ties to other participants, not ideology. Ziad Munson found many pro-life activists got involved through relationships first and developed strong views afterward. And Hahrie Han’s How Organizations Develop Activists is the best modern treatment: she distinguishes “mobilizing” (getting lots of people to take a single action) from “organizing” (small-group work that turns people into leaders who recruit others), and finds the high-performing chapters do much more of the second.

I don’t actually know if that’s the top thing the world needs, but it would be good. But certainly, if all that matters is something like elite consensus and this would take too long to make happen, then it may just not be the right idea.

I’ve done this before in Montreal. It was fun, though in general this gets done by people out of the goodness of their hearts and comes from their personal funds.

I’ll still do more (with the gracious help of my girlfriend who is not in AI safety), though! I suspect that making it easy for parents would be helpful to welcome more senior people, too.