How I got my non-tech friends to learn about AI safety

TL;DR: I built an open-source, two-hour interactive presentation on AI safety for non-technical audiences. Here’s a recap of what it covers, how it went, and how you can use it yourself. Epistemic status: personal experience from one session with six close friends, plus impressions from conversations with people inside and outside the field over the past six months. I've been a machine learning engineer for almost 10 years, working in scale-ups and startups, even as a CTO. And not once during all those years did I really realise how dangerous AI could be. Not until a friend actually showed me. Six months ago, I quit my job to transition into AI safety, after realising that AI might be one of the most critical dangers we're facing. Today I’m launching my own AI safety non-profit. But this post is not about me. It's about something I've been realising over the past six months: most people outside of AI safety simply don't understand the risks of AI. And I think one of the main reasons is that they don't even realise how powerful AI already is. Or at least, that’s my impression when I talk to people around me. Polls in the US show that many people say they are worried about AI , but i