Exercising Agency
I went to an AI protest in San Francisco last week. Stop the AI Race (1), got the Bay Area community together in front of Anthropic’s headquarters to demand AI companies stop production of frontier model development that can be detrimental to the longevity of humanity.
They aren’t asking to completely abolish AI, but rather, they’re trying to prevent money-hungry companies from creating a technology called artificial superintelligence—this is basically a computer with cognitive capacities surpassing human intelligence (2).
Speeches by professors and other advocates informed the community that rapidly developing technologies are driving us into an uncertain future.
Protestors of all ages and backgrounds—children and elderly, community members, and tech professionals—congregated outside the office of Anthropic, creating their own protest signs with supplies provided by the organizers, all connecting over a shared goal. The group then marched through the streets of San Francisco, all the way up to the offices of OpenAI and xAI.
They shouted up at Sam Altman (Open AI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Elon Musk (xAI):
“For our future, Stop the AI Race.”
I saw people standing up to Big Tech—using agency against something considered inevitable.
From my perspective on the scene, these moments can be integral to making cultural change. This struggle with technology is being approached from the bottom up, a grassroots movement.
What I took from this monumental moment is that the next step in addressing Big Tech is to change the way we interact with their platforms.
At the end of the day, these technologies aren’t going anywhere. They’re here to stay.
It will take intentional tech use to drive ourselves into our own future, separate from Big Tech’s Agenda.
My question is: How do we, as students, address our relationship with these technologies?
Will we let Big Tech use us? No.
We should be consistent with UC Berkeley’s history of pioneering cultural innovations. This means standing up for what we believe. If we don’t use our agency, we will lose our agency.
I decided to use my agency. I’ve been working with a few other students to create a policy proposal suggesting that UC Berkeley address the imminent harm of unmediated technology use in the classroom. I would love to hear your feedback. Take this short survey we’ve designed to reflect every point in our proposal. This is your moment to make your voice heard.
If this is something you are passionate about, make it known.
If this is something you fundamentally disagree with, make it known.
Whatever you do, do not take a passive role in your life.
Photo by Jeff Baker