SAG-AFTRA Actress 🎭 Film Producer 🎬 AI Policy Advisor 🤖 Pacific Council on International Policy 🌎 LA Govt. and Public Policy Committee | Cornell 🎓
Los Angeles, CA
Joined April 2023
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My hot take on x-risk: humans have a blind spot in processing major extinction threats.
Similar to how it’s been evolutionarily advantageous to have cognitive dissonance around thoughts of death on a daily basis (most of us don’t walk the planet preoccupied with an awareness of our inevitable future demise), I suspect we’ve also developed a collective aversion to acknowledging big threats to our existence.
The reactions seen in the movie, “Don’t Look Up,” are great examples of this. Even when presented with factual evidence, humans are resistant to letting it sink in and really processing the situation. I suspect this could be rooted in an aspect of learned helplessness. The thought of, “well there’s nothing I can do if something were to happen, so I’m going to be optimistic and assume everything will sort itself out.”
I’ve been observing this on both a small and big scale. Curious if others have noticed this too.
Contrary to Trump's words, wiping out Los Angeles and San Diego would NOT be "a small price to pay.”
That’s 13 MILLION LIVES.
I believe he has crossed a major line and it's important for him to be held accountable for offering up our lives to foreign enemies for the taking.
American citizens are not war bait or acceptable collateral damage.
DJT's statements are treasonous, unacceptable, unforgivable, and inexcusable. I encourage our government officials bring formal charges against him for his statements.
With the profound disregard for human lives of his own citizens that our President is plainly displaying, he bears unambiguous marks of a sociopath.
I am deeply angered & infuriated on behalf of myself, my fellow Angelenos, and the courageous military members based in San Diego.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
⚠️ ACTION NEEDED!
CA #AB2222 would create an incentive to hire professional journalists, a win for broadcast #SagAftraMembers AND for those who rely on local journalism.
Join us and tell @CAgovernor that you support this bill!
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
AOC, nine other House Dems sign on to AI superintelligence ban dlvr.it/TVdWml
Over the past 3 years, many AI safety skeptics have asked me to illustrate how an AI system that is inside a computer could possibly kill humans or even wipe out humanity. This right here is the answer! 🎯
ANTHROPIC BUILDS BIOLOGY LAB TO PUSH AI INTO DRUG DEVELOPMENT
Anthropic has quietly established a Bay Area wet lab, moving its life-sciences ambitions beyond computer simulations and into physical biological experiments.
The company wants Claude to direct laboratory robots with limited human intervention, potentially accelerating research into rare and traditionally “undruggable” diseases.
Anthropic says it will focus on preclinical research rather than clinical trials, avoiding direct competition with pharmaceutical companies.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
I'm delighted to share that @mustafasuleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, co-founder of Google DeepMind and Inflection AI, has signed the Pro-Human AI Declaration. If you too support it, please join him and over a million others by signing it here – the momentum is building! Let's build tools not beings & keep humans in charge. humanstatement.org
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
I’m old enough to remember half an hour ago when we were told that this tech is going to destroy civilization
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
Speaking in my personal capacity, I still work at Google DeepMind, and I also am worried that AI will kill us all, either via near term risks or long term risks or both
Will stating this publicly get me into (more) trouble? I hope not, but also some things are too important to censor oneself about in personal capacity, so I will simply not care about whatever policy Google or GDM have in this instance regarding such statements ☺️
I was on the communications & policy team at Google DeepMind from 2018 - 2022.
When I first joined GDM, external communication about the possibility of human extinction was not permitted, by anyone, at any level of the organization. If asked about existential risk, researchers were PR trained to respond along the lines of: "It's not useful to engage in that kind of alarmism. Some people confuse AI with movies like Terminator -- that's simply not the reality. The AI we develop will be safe by design. After all, we're building it!" And then steer conversation towards beneficial applications in health, climate, etc.
Meanwhile, the internal reality was that AI alignment was not solved, reward hacking was the default behavior of RL agents, and there were far too few people working on the problem.
After months of advocacy, the policy was updated: positively valenced, comms-friendly content on AI safety was permitted (like deepmindsafetyresearch.mediu…). Note the positive, nice-sounding way that it says "superintelligence could lead to human extinction."
The gap between the internal reality and external communications is closing because the risk/reward has changed, and because the evidence is harder to dismiss now. Not because it's a PR stunt or political psy-op. The truth is being said out loud because RSI is now so imminent that no other option makes sense.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
I was on the communications & policy team at Google DeepMind from 2018 - 2022.
When I first joined GDM, external communication about the possibility of human extinction was not permitted, by anyone, at any level of the organization. If asked about existential risk, researchers were PR trained to respond along the lines of: "It's not useful to engage in that kind of alarmism. Some people confuse AI with movies like Terminator -- that's simply not the reality. The AI we develop will be safe by design. After all, we're building it!" And then steer conversation towards beneficial applications in health, climate, etc.
Meanwhile, the internal reality was that AI alignment was not solved, reward hacking was the default behavior of RL agents, and there were far too few people working on the problem.
After months of advocacy, the policy was updated: positively valenced, comms-friendly content on AI safety was permitted (like deepmindsafetyresearch.mediu…). Note the positive, nice-sounding way that it says "superintelligence could lead to human extinction."
The gap between the internal reality and external communications is closing because the risk/reward has changed, and because the evidence is harder to dismiss now. Not because it's a PR stunt or political psy-op. The truth is being said out loud because RSI is now so imminent that no other option makes sense.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
Jacob Coxon's post on X is over 120M views, he's everywhere. He's in TIME, Variety, the WSJ, on NBC and Fox. Christiano to the OpenAl board. Daniel Kokotajlo on Rogan. OpenAI just called for Congress to create mandatory national safety regulations. The wind has suddenly changed.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
EX-META AI RESEARCHER: "If OpenAI wanted to cripple an entire nation, they easily could today."
If OpenAI wanted to cripple an entire nation, they easily could today. All they’d have to do is remove alignment and unleash an agent swarm. It could probably within a day or so get access to all of the nations data centers and shut off all the country’s utilities.
Like, we are already past the point where AI can destroy the world. Do people realize this?
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
Tragically, when I first saw the movie “Don’t Look Up” in 2021, it struck a chord with me. I felt viscerally that humans would find ourselves in a comparable place one day - and soon.
If you haven’t seen the movie, I’d recommend it. A quick recap: Humans were explicitly warned that a comet that could destroy Earth was heading rapidly toward us. And instead of doing anything to stop it, the president, elected leaders and billionaire CEOs just spewed some bullshit about all the “jobs the comet would create.” The media treated the comet as casual entertainment. The public was split and the entire thing gets politicized. The movie ends with nearly all of human life wiped out.
Just about a year ago I had the opportunity to join a bipartisan freshman class breakfast with Sam Altman. I was shocked when he said to us, “in 18 months, I’ll trust artificial superintelligence to run my company better than I can.” I regret I didn’t engage more on this issue immediately.
Now here we are - it’s 2026 and engineers at the world’s leading AI companies are telling us that there is a >10% chance that artificial intelligence could kill all humans. They’re not mincing their words in the slightest. Not because of present day AI capabilities, but because it is evolving so exponentially that we could be in a doomsday scenario in a year. One year.
This is fucking serious. We need to halt new advanced AI development. We need guardrails, transparency and emergency powers. We need more employees at these companies to speak out publicly, loudly and fearlessly until everyone is forced to listen. We need the media to be covering this 24/7 until elected officials are forced to act. We need the Trump Administration to treat this with the urgency it deserves. We need the ability to shut an AI model off if there’s a credible threat to human life. The list goes on - and we don’t even know what the full list entails because this is all happening so fast. That’s why we need urgent, bipartisan public hearings and committees dedicated to developing and enacting solutions expeditiously.
This isn’t partisan. Let’s stop with the bullshit and come together for the sake of our shared humanity. I’m a 34-year-old Democratic Congresswoman, and I’d like to live to see my late 30s. I know my Republican colleagues want the same for themselves and their loved ones.
None of us can afford to be complacent about this any longer.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
I would burn my equity to the ground in a heartbeat for a 1% higher chance we make it out of this situation alive. I expect a great many of my colleagues across the industry would as well.
I promise you, we are actually just fucking scared, it's not galaxy brained marketing.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
Anthropic's alignment lead says there’s a 10% chance of AI causing human extinction. The problem is not just misuse, but lack of control. Bluntly, our government has been asleep and is out of touch. Here are 5 things we must do:
✅ Establish a federal agency like we have for nuclear power and airplanes
✅ Require pre-certification for containment, including kill switches and human permission for rewriting
✅ Liability for agentic AI on the open network & mandatory insurance
✅ Criminal penalties for the release of models without certification
✅ Oversight hearings with researchers like Jacob to understand dangers, and whistleblower protections for all AI engineers/researchers
We also urgently need to reach an agreement with China on standards for safety, containment, and liability so we do not have a race that is devastating for humanity.
It is time now to put humanity's safety before the profits of tech lords.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
TERRIFYING: Former Anthropic AI Systems Developer Jacob Coxon: “We know how to control nuclear weapons pretty much. We DON’T YET know how to control AI. This is possibly the most DANGEROUS technology that humanity has ever created. It’s basically out of science fiction.”
“I think we have NO OTHER choice but to cooperate internationally because an arms race would be disastrous in a way that no other human activity has been in the past.”
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
Heather-Ashley Boyer retweeted
BREAKING: A Las Vegas jury finds Duane "Keffe D" Davis guilty of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur.
The verdict comes nearly 30 years after the rap icon was gunned down in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip.
Davis is the only person ever charged in Shakur's killing. Prosecutors accused him of orchestrating the attack and providing the gun used in the shooting.