Existential Risk Observatory

Mostly this is the personal efforts of Otto Barten, ultimately advocating for a conditional pause. For modest amounts of money, in prior years he’s managed to have a hand in some high profile existential risk events and get the first x-risk related post into TIME magazine. He’s now pivoted to pause-relevant research (as in how to implement one via treaties, off switches, evals and threat models).

The track record and my prior investigation is less relevant now, so I’ve bumped them down to low confidence, but it would definitely be good to have the technical ability to pause and not enough work is being done on that.

To donate, click here, or get in touch at info@existentialriskobservatory.org.

Existential Risk Observatory writes media articles on AI x-risk, does policy research, and publishes policy proposals (see pdf with a summary of proposals).

Last year, I wrote:

My primary concern is that it operates in the Netherlands. Dutch policy is unlikely to have much influence on x-risk—the United States is the most important country by far, followed by China. And a Dutch organization likely has little influence on United States policy. Existential Risk Observatory can still influence public opinion in America (for example via its TIME article), but I expect a US-headquartered org to have a greater impact.

I’m less concerned about that now—I believe I gave too little weight to the fact that Existential Risk Observatory has published articles in international media outlets.

I still like media outreach as a form of impact, but it’s not my favorite thing, so Existential Risk Observatory is not one of my top candidates.

Existential Risk Observatory writes media articles on AI x-risk, does policy research, and publishes policy proposals (see pdf with a summary of proposals).

• It appears to be having some success bringing public attention to x-risk via mainstream media, including advocating for a pause in TIME (jointly with Joep Meindertsma of PauseAI).
• Its policy proposals are serious: it proposes implementing an AI pause, tracking frontier AI hardware, and explicitly recognizing extinction risk in regulations.
• The research mainly focuses on public opinion, for example opinions on AI capabilities/danger (pdf) and message testing on an AI moratorium (pdf).

Existential Risk Observatory is small and funding-constrained, so I expect that donations would be impactful.

My primary concern is that it operates in the Netherlands. Dutch policy is unlikely to have much influence on x-risk—the United States is the most important country by far, followed by China. And a Dutch organization likely has little influence on United States policy. Existential Risk Observatory can still influence public opinion in America (for example via its TIME article), but I expect a US-headquartered org to have a greater impact.