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8,000 hours: Positive impact jobs

I am genuinely worried about the existential risk that AI may pose to humanity in the next decade. Some people take this as a unreal threat inherited from science fiction movies, but I beg to differ. I have studied AI fundamentals when I was in college, and I even ended up doing AI professionally a decade ago for a few months (when LLMs weren’t a thing, the transformer paper had just been published, and random forest was still winning Kaggle competitions). Sadly, I don’t think I have the required background to contribute to this problem in any way.

The other day I mentioned this to a colleague. I was explaining how I would love to be contributing to all of the hard global problems that we are facing as a society (and a species), even if my contribution was a drop in the ocean. I was expecting his answer to be: “I know, there’s not much you can do apart from running for politian or becoming an activist”. But to my surprise he pointed me to 80,000 hours. I haven’t tried it yet, but I loved the idea of this site.

The basic idea is that _“You have 80,000 hours in your career. This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.”.

The platform seems to offer a job board and career advice to help one make the most impact it can over hard global problems while following ones passion. I’ve been lurking the job board but I haven’t yet seen any opportunity that fits my background (it seems I am not a good match to contribute to solving our existential risks). Anyways, an interesting site to keep an eye on. Even if there is not a job for you, I think the idea of the 80,000 hours is really powerful, and worth keeping it in mind in our day to day.

Another interesting org exploring ways to address existential risks is https://www.nonlinear.org/.

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