"AGI safety career advice" by Richard Ngo

People often ask me for career advice related to AGI safety. This post summarizes the advice I most commonly give. I’ve split it into three sections: general mindset, alignment research and governance work. For each of the latter two, I start with high-level advice aimed primarily at students and those early in their careers, then dig into more details of the field. See also this post I wrote two years ago, containing a bunch of fairly general career advice. ## General mindset In order to have a big impact on the world you need to find a big lever. This document assumes that you think, as I do, that AGI safety is the biggest such lever. There are many ways to pull on that lever, though—from research and engineering to operations and field-building to politics and communications. I encourage you to choose between these based primarily on your personal fit—a combination of what you're really good at and what you really enjoy. In my opinion the difference between being a great versus a mediocre fit swamps other differences in the impactfulness of most pairs of AGI-safety-related jobs.

Original article:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xg7gxsYaMa6F3uH8h/agi-safety-career-advice

Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.