Your Biggest Lever: Designing your AI Career for Maximum Impact, with 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd
Hello and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution.
Today, my guest is Ben Todd, co-founder of the non-profit career strategy organization 80,000 Hours, and author of the book, by the same name, which, 10 years after the first edition, is being re-released today, May 26th, fully re-written for the modern AI moment.
Looking back on the last decade, I think you'd have a hard time finding a source of information that would have better prepared for the present situation than 80,000 Hours. Their emphasis on pandemic preparedness pre-dated by years and was tragically validated by the COVID experience, they were well ahead of the curve in recognizing the importance of AI and encouraging people to work on AI safety projects, their podcast and blog have been a consistently excellent source of fresh perspectives on cutting edge ideas, and their free 1:1 career advisory service was useful to me, personally, as I made the jump from entrepreneur to full-time student of AI roughly 4 years ago.
With that in mind, today's conversation is an overview of Ben's latest thinking on how you – yes, you – can apply your skills to improve the chances that AI really does end up benefitting all humanity.
We begin with Ben's thoughts on AI timelines, a question that he reframes, encouraging people to ask not when exactly AGI or superintelligence will arrive, but when, under varying assumptions, your own personal impact will peak. Ben argues, that under all but the most extreme short-timeline views, there is still time to invest in positioning oneself for maximum impact.
From there, we turn to the top problems that Ben and the 80,000 Hours team see in the world today – that we might lose control of AI systems, that AI could concentrate power in unprecedented and deeply problematic ways, and that we're still not well-prepared for the next pandemic.
We get Ben's perspective on arguments for and against AI safety focused people going to work at frontier AI companies, including his thoughts on the critical discipline of continually questioning one's own motives and the importance of peer effects.
We discuss different lines of work, including technical research, policy-making and advising, communications, and organization-building, all of which Ben believes have an important role to play.
We assess the funding environment, with the encouraging conclusion that there is currently plenty of funding available to support ambitious projects.
We analyze whether it makes more sense to join an existing org that's working to scale, or start a new one from scratch.
And we get Ben's take on what new ideas, including concerns around AI welfare, gradual disempowerment, and space governance are potentially undervalued today.
To be clear, this conversation is not a substitute for the book, which contains a lot more practical advice than we were able to cover today, but I hope it serves to inspire you to think bigger and more pro-socially about your own career, and to alert you to the outsized impact that your personal contribution can still have on the shape of the AI future.
With that, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Ben Todd, co-founder and author, of 80,000 Hours.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz