Artificial Intelligence and You 297 - Guest: Holly Elmore, AI Pause Advocate, part 1
11 snips
Feb 23, 2026 
Holly Elmore, founder of Pause AI US and former evolutionary biologist with a Harvard PhD, explains the Pause movement and why an indefinite halt on frontier AI matters. She links animal-welfare ethics to AI safety. Short takes cover pauses as strategy, limits of compute-based metrics, hardware governance, and how industry normalizes risk.
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From Wild Animal Welfare To AI Activism
- Holly moved from wild animal welfare research to AI activism after seeing ChatGPT and believing transformative tech was the only scalable solution for wild-animal suffering.
- Her background: PhD in evolutionary biology and work at Rethink Priorities informed skepticism about large-scale techno-fixes.
Tech Solutions To Wild Suffering Create New Risks
- Transformative tech is needed to alter biosphere-level evolutionary pressures that cause wild-animal suffering, but such solutions themselves create deep governance and ethical risks.
- Holly cites hedonic-engineering thought experiments requiring constant surveillance and control to maintain a blissful biosphere as practically and ethically fraught.
Rejecting Genocidal And Totalitarian Fixes
- Holly rejected extreme proposals like large-scale depopulation or omnipotent technocratic control because they either erase positive experiences or demand perpetual totalitarian oversight.
- She argues both "no-animals" and perpetual-engineered-bliss approaches are ethically and practically unacceptable.