I’m weighing my career options, and the two issues that seem most important to me are factory farming and preventing misuse/s-risks from AI. Working for a lab-grown meat startup seems like a very high-impact line of work that could also be technically interesting. I think I would enjoy that career a lot.
However, I believe that S-risks from human misuse of AI and neuroscience introduce scenarios that dwarf factory-farming in awfulness. I think that there are lots of incredibly intelligent people working on figuring out how to align AIs to who/what we want. But I don’t think there’s nearly the same amount of effort being made towards the coordination problem/preventing misuse. So naturally, I’d really like to work on solving this, but I just don’t even know how I’d start tackling this problem. It seems much harder and much less straightforward than “help make lab-grown meat cheap enough to end factory farming.” So, any advice would be appreciated.
I am pretty good at math. At a T20 math program I was chosen for special mentorship and research opportunities over several people who made Top 500 on the Putnam due to me being deemed “more talented” (as nebulous as that phrase is, I was significantly faster in lectures than them and was able to digest graduate texts much quicker than them, I was also able to solve competition-style problems they couldn’t). My undergrad got interrupted by a health crisis so I never got a chance to actually engage in research or dedicated Putnam prep, but I believe most (maybe all if I’m being vain) of my professors would have considered me the brightest student in my year. I don’t know a lot about programming or ML at this point, but I am confident I could learn. I’m two years into my undergrad and will likely be returning next year.
My default drive-by recommendation is that you try to get involved in research related to these issues. You could try to get advice from Chi Nguyen, who works on s-risk and is friendly and thoughtful; you can contact her here.
I’m weighing my career options, and the two issues that seem most important to me are factory farming and preventing misuse/s-risks from AI. Working for a lab-grown meat startup seems like a very high-impact line of work that could also be technically interesting. I think I would enjoy that career a lot.
However, I believe that S-risks from human misuse of AI and neuroscience introduce scenarios that dwarf factory-farming in awfulness. I think that there are lots of incredibly intelligent people working on figuring out how to align AIs to who/what we want. But I don’t think there’s nearly the same amount of effort being made towards the coordination problem/preventing misuse. So naturally, I’d really like to work on solving this, but I just don’t even know how I’d start tackling this problem. It seems much harder and much less straightforward than “help make lab-grown meat cheap enough to end factory farming.” So, any advice would be appreciated.
What are your skill sets?
Forethought has done work recently related to preventing S-risk arising from AI.
I’m pretty in favor of trying to tackle the most important cause area.
I am pretty good at math. At a T20 math program I was chosen for special mentorship and research opportunities over several people who made Top 500 on the Putnam due to me being deemed “more talented” (as nebulous as that phrase is, I was significantly faster in lectures than them and was able to digest graduate texts much quicker than them, I was also able to solve competition-style problems they couldn’t). My undergrad got interrupted by a health crisis so I never got a chance to actually engage in research or dedicated Putnam prep, but I believe most (maybe all if I’m being vain) of my professors would have considered me the brightest student in my year. I don’t know a lot about programming or ML at this point, but I am confident I could learn. I’m two years into my undergrad and will likely be returning next year.
My default drive-by recommendation is that you try to get involved in research related to these issues. You could try to get advice from Chi Nguyen, who works on s-risk and is friendly and thoughtful; you can contact her here.
Thank you so much! I will contact her.