The remarkable story of AIGS Canada

TLDR: Four years ago we put out a short post on LW announcing that an AI governance and safety community had formed in Canada. This is the remarkable story of what happened next. Information on how to join or support us is shared at the end. I will also be at Less Online.Imagine humanity in a few years, and the development of advanced AI has gone well. We navigated the risks of catastrophic loss of control and kept the most powerful tools out of the hands of bad actors. The benefits and power it created were sufficiently shared. We ended up in a world the vast majority of human beings want to be in.We’re shaking our heads and smiling in relief and disbelief that we all made it through, and agreeing “...a lot of things had to go well for this to happen, people and institutions around the world had to step up, and also - thank God for f*#king Canada...”.In a world that will need all the help it can get to navigate AI, every country should set their sights that high.And so we ask: What would Canada’s contribution have been? Did Prime Minister Carney leverage his Davos speech leadership into effective global coordination on AI? Perhaps it was seed funding for critical AI safety research that unlocked key technical solutions. Or we piloted the first full-scale national conversation on ASI, gaining key insights from the broader public and shaping a global narrative as to what success on AI even looks like.At a minimum, Canada would need to be situationally aware vis-à-vis superintelligence and making smart decisions.But for the last few years, the main decision makers in the country have not been giving any indication of this kind of awareness, either in words or deeds. Despite growing numbers of parliamentarians and officials who have been briefed on superintelligence and expressed sincere concern, it has yet to become a political priority in Ottawa.Enter AI Governance and Safety Canada (AIGS), a nonpartisan not-for-profit launched in 2022 with the question “What can we