{"id":489804,"date":"2026-10-09T00:42:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T00:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/489804\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T00:42:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T00:42:12","slug":"at-this-san-francisco-picnic-people-share-their-ai-anxieties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/489804\/","title":{"rendered":"At this San Francisco picnic, people share their AI anxieties"},"content":{"rendered":"

Urgent concerns about losing control of AI have burst into the national conversation in recent weeks, after the OpenAI hack of the open-source AI platform Hugging Face<\/a>, the high-profile resignation of an Anthropic researcher<\/a>, and other AI insiders sharing alarmingly high p(doom) figures<\/a> \u2014 that is, the probability that AI kills us all. <\/p>\n

These discussions may have only recently broken through to the mainstream public and to policymakers, but they\u2019ve been going on in AI circles in the San Francisco Bay Area for years, and they\u2019ve been gaining intensity. I went to put my ear to the ground at a gathering in San Francisco to discuss these issues.<\/p>\n

An event listing<\/a> for a picnic beckoned people in the AI scene to spend a Sunday afternoon talking about recent calls to slow down the technology.<\/p>\n

It was one of those postcard-perfect days at the 5-acre China Basin park on the San Francisco Bay, overlooking a Giants-Dodgers game at the ballpark. <\/p>\n

Dony Christie, a community organizer in the AI safety scene, chose this spot not for the scenery but because it\u2019s between the offices of Anthropic and OpenAI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hope is, why can’t people at the labs just meet at a park in between them and work out a deal?\u201d he said. \u201cI have been concerned about existential risks for a long time. Just like, what do I do to save the world?\u201d<\/p>\n

Not being a diplomat or political leader, he said he\u2019s starting small \u2014 hashing out ideas to prevent the collapse of civilization over chips and cookies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s a microcosm of the sort of cooperation that I want to see,\u201d Christie said.<\/p>\n

A couple dozen people gathered over the afternoon, from AI startups, Big Tech, research nonprofits and activist organizations. I joined a group sitting in a circle on a big blanket like summer camp.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne thing I agree with is that safety is an engineering problem,\u201d said Skye Gunasekaran, who researches AI agent collaboration at a productivity software company.<\/p>\n

\u201cI pretty strongly disagree with that,\u201d said Elliot Callender, a protest organizer who spent more than a month demonstrating in front of OpenAI and is now planning actions at the U.S. Capitol.<\/p>\n

Gunasekaran thinks better cybersecurity systems would go a long way to improving safety, but she supports international cooperation to slow the race.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there’s lots of reasons without even talking about the end of the world and all of these different kinds of things,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you just want to think about, OK, what are we seeing right now?\u201d<\/p>\n

She points to rogue hacking incidents and Anthropic reports<\/a> that nefarious actors have attempted to use AI for cyber espionage or to build weapons. \u201cWe just need to spend some time to understand,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The more pessimistic Elliot Callender is calling for a complete stop to advanced AI development.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get to the point where it’s actually superhuman and everything, and it’ll break out once, and then it’s game over at that point,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I just decided that was what I’m going to do the rest of my life, is to make it not kill everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew Khoriaty sits somewhere in between \u2014 both on the blanket and philosophically. He said AI companies should be heavily regulated and held liable for harms. \u201cWe can treat them like people who are managing dangerous animals.\u201d <\/p>\n

Khoriaty recently turned down a software engineering job at Amazon with a nearly $200,000 annual salary to take a fellowship with the AI safety nonprofit Pivotal for a third of the pay.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is at risk,\u201d he said, \u201cand I want to do things to reduce that risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everyone I spoke with at this AI picnic expressed that sense of urgency \u2014 rearranging and accelerating life plans against the drumbeat of AI doom. Gunasekaran said she\u2019s questioning plans to get a Ph.D. Callender said he\u2019s recalculating risk.<\/p>\n

\u201cI walk across a crosswalk when the cars are still coming at me, because if I can save like 10 seconds by taking a one in 100 million chance of getting hit by a car, then it’s actually worth it for me,\u201d he said. \u201cWhereas it wouldn’t be if I had a lot more time left.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that kind of thing that sometimes gets this crowd labelled as doomers, and it\u2019s usually not a compliment. But organizer Dony Christie takes it in stride.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I have a role. It’s like a night watchman,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to help calibrate what is. As a Buddhist might say, like a skillful fear, skillful action in the face of danger.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even doomers like to get out to a picnic and touch grass sometimes.<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Urgent concerns about losing control of AI have burst into the national conversation in recent weeks, after the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489805,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[19534,2080,7,191184,3408,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-489804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-california","tag-existential-risks","tag-openai","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}