Extinction risk is not the right first sentence

Money wins quiet fights but votes win louder ones. What actually moves the public to act on AI, and why it decides which regulations and safeguards survive. This is my first post here. My leaning into AI safety is still in it's formative phase but I come at it as a tech founder and builder rather than a researcher. I've spent a while trying to work out why so much good safety work isn't becoming regulation and surviving contact with the industry's lobby. The argument below in a nutshell is: the AI safety field leads comms with its least mobilising frame, extinction, when the harms that actually move people to act are instead concrete and proximate, and an organised public might be the missing half that keeps any safeguard and regulation alive. If that's true, then I share some ideas on what we do about it . I'm learning in public so I'd love any comments, counter-arguments, clarifications and additional perspectives. As a spring dawn emerged over the desert, residents of Doña Ana County were waking to find their letterboxes strewn with flyers of a smiling Hispanic woman promising hundreds of millions in investment and high-paying careers in return for their approval of Project Jupiter . Against that backdrop Daisy Maldonado, a first-time candidate, ran for local office with the endorsement of Bernie Sanders , pitting her candidacy directly against a $165 billion data centre. In rural Utah, thousands have similarly voiced concern, and growing anger. Across the USA, over 800 c…