“The Spectre haunting the “AI Safety” Community” by Gabriel Alfour

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Recorded21 Feb 2026

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I’m the originator behind ControlAI's Direct Institutional Plan (the DIP), built to address extinction risks from superintelligence. My diagnosis is simple: most laypeople and policy makers have not heard of AGI, ASI, extinction risks, or what it takes to prevent the development of ASI. Instead, most AI Policy Organisations and Think Tanks act as if “Persuasion” was the bottleneck. This is why they care so much about respectability, the Overton Window, and other similar social considerations. Before we started the DIP, many of these experts stated that our topics were too far out of the Overton Window. They warned that politicians could not hear about binding regulation, extinction risks, and superintelligence. Some mentioned “downside risks” and recommended that we focus instead on “current issues”. They were wrong. In the UK, in little more than a year, we have briefed +150 lawmakers, and so far, 112 have supported our campaign about binding regulation, extinction risks and superintelligence. The Simple Pipeline In my experience, the way things work is through a straightforward pipeline: Attention. Getting the attention of people. At ControlAI, we do it through ads for lay people, and through cold emails for politicians. Information. Telling people about the [...] ---Outline:(01:18) The Simple Pipeline(04:26) The Spectre(09:38) Conclusion --- First published: February 21st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LuAmvqjf87qLG9Bdx/the-spectre-haunting-the-ai-safety-community --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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