Description du poste
PauseAI UK is holding the March Against AI Extinction in London on Saturday 21 November. Joseph Miller explains why here. Should you attend? In this article, I will attempt to shed light on this with a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Rough BOTEC1. SetupThe march will take 3 hours, excluding travel. The goal is to compare an afternoon at the march with some number of hours of external AI safety research.
Now, attending the protest is useful because it drives AI x-risk press coverage. So we need some exchange rate between that and research.
Here's my judgement call: I would be equally happy to either:
• Increase the amount of external AI safety research over the next 6 months by 1%.• Increase the amount of AI x-risk press coverage over the next 6 months by 1.5%.That is, the model I'm using looks something like:
impact = 1.5 · log(research hours) + log(press coverage)
So our plan is:
• How much will attending increase press coverage, percentage-wise?• Divide that by 1.5, to get the equivalently valuable increase in research.• How many research hours would yield that increase in research?2. What % does one marcher add to press coverage?Crowd size. I expect about N = 670 people will attend the march. PauseAI had a march in February which drew 300–500, and this one should be bigger given the increased salience. The Luma page has 1,200 sign-ups, and a 50% turnout seems reasonable. So one more marcher raises the crowd by 1/670 ≈ 0.15%.
Coverage of this march. Let's suppose the press coverage for this march grows like N^ε for some ε. So increasing the crowd by 0.15% would increase the coverage by ε × 0.15%. Claude estimates that ε ≈ 0.49. That means that attending adds +0.073% to this march's coverage.[1]
How Claude estimated ε = 0.49Method. For seven AI x-risk protests between June 2025 and October 2026, I took the crowd size reported in coverage (the geometric midpoint of the reported range) and listed the news coverage I could find through web searches. Syndicated copie