A note from our founder

I spent 20 years working on climate change. Today, I’m writing you with a new mission.

I was in my twenties when I helped start 350.org. At the time, the smartest people in Washington told us climate change was just a niche issue normal people didn’t care about. Fossil fuels were the economy. The politics were impossible. The best we could hope for was to pass small incremental policies, adapt gracefully to a warming world and stop making so much noise about it.

The conventional wisdom was wrong – but not because we convinced them. The fossil fuel industry had bought influence, politicians, and power with their unlimited profits. We learned we had to out-organize them. People showed up — along pipeline routes, at city council meetings, at their own banks and universities and state capitols and by the millions in the streets — until the politicians who had been ignoring us decided that ignoring us cost more than doing something about it.

I see echoes of the same story in the fight to regulate AI.

Experts tell us we’re in the early days of AI – the systems will continue to get more and more powerful, and yet they’re already breaking containment to pursue goals we don’t understand. AI is already displacing workers, and slowing hiring across the economy. It is already worsening inequality, increasing surveillance, supercharging emissions and hiking utility bills, causing mental health crises, and even taking the lives of our children.

One of the most infuriating investigative reports I came across while working on climate change was about Exxon’s research on the topic. Their own scientists had known carbon emissions from fossil fuels were warming the planet since at least 1977 – decades longer than most others. They considered warning the rest of us, and decided not to so they could continue to rake in profits.

Look at how today’s Big Tech CEOs talk about AI. Sam Altman has said “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.” Elon Musk agrees with the sentiment. They know better than anyone what they’re building; the idea is to replace human beings with machines wherever possible and amass unimaginable wealth and power in the process, no matter what the cost is to the rest of us.

But lately, these same CEOs are singing a different tune. They’re trying to paint a rosy picture of the future: abundant, fully automated, endlessly healthy lives of leisure. It reminds me of the early days of social media. While titans of industry used lofty language to sell Facebook and Twitter as utopias of connection and information-sharing, they quietly defanged government’s ability to regulate them, and built software designed to extract profit off of human attention spans and data, leaving us more isolated, divided, and lonely than ever.

We can’t let that happen with AI, because the stakes are too high. We have to see the rosy pitch for what it is: a desperate bid to run back the same playbook we’ve seen generation after generation, to privatize profits for wealthy CEOs and investors while the rest of us bear the most obscene costs imaginable.

Right now some of the most important decisions on Earth are being made in a handful of rooms in northern California by people who will never meet our kids, and who have said out loud, in public and in interviews and in their own safety reports, that they are building something that could go catastrophically wrong, and that they intend to keep building it anyway because the money is too good to stop.

They get to make those choices because nobody is making them answer for it. Nobody is holding them accountable.

To date, there’s been a decade-long bi-partisan effort to let these companies develop any kind of technology they want – regardless of how dangerous or disruptive – with no guardrails.

So we’re coming together to say: the era of doing nothing on AI is over.

We, as humans, are Irreplaceable, and we have demands: An economy that works for everyone and not just Big AI and its executives; Keeping our essential freedoms intact against systems designed to strip them away; And a hard line against building machines that put all of us at serious existential risk.

I’m asking you to show up: In person, with your neighbors, in rooms where decisions get made. The AI industry's greatest asset right now is that our anger lives in comment sections and whispered conversations by the water cooler or at the backyard barbecue, where it can be safely ignored.

But five people at a PTO meeting is a hassle; two hundred people at a county board meeting is a crowd; thousands at a State Capitol is a constituency; millions in the streets is a movement; and every politician in America knows the difference.

When we come together to make our voices heard, it echoes the thing I have watched work so many times before. A movement gets big enough and loud enough and local enough that the people in charge start listening. It’s not rocket science. It's arithmetic, and we can do the math.

20 years ago I was told the climate fight wasn’t worth fighting – that the fossil fuel companies were too powerful, that we had already lost. But we organized, built power, and made ourselves unignorable until we were able to pass federal legislation. We didn't win everything – there’s still much, much more to do. But we broke the conventional wisdom that nothing could be done, and everything that has been accomplished since has run through that crack.

The odds are tough – we’re up against the most powerful oligarchs in the history of this country – but this is not a hopeless fight. We are here to say that we are irreplaceable, and I’m grateful to be in this fight with each one of you.

Let’s get to work.