Hello all! I’ve been reading LessWrong consistently for a little while now, primarily on AI topics, and figured it would be worth making an account so that I can contribute to the excellent discussion space that exists here in the future.
I’m a 27yo tech worker, and while I am currently unemployed, I have prior experience working at companies like Meta and observing how attitudes towards AI have been developing in that particular environment. I’ve always been considered by my peers to be quite bright (high school valedictorian, near-perfect SATs, blah blah), and for much of my life I’ve grappled with what to point my mental capacity towards in order to feel like I was using it for something worthwhile. I would argue that, broadly, I have failed at this in my life thus far—I do not consider building more effective ads on Facebook to be a particularly worthwhile cause.
But over the last year or so, the discussion here on LW has thoroughly convinced me that AI safety and alignment is the single most important problem of our lifetimes and very arguably the most important problem in human history. As such, I feel an ethical compulsion to start steering my life in the direction of trying to do my part to aid humanity’s effort to control AI before it is too late. While I’m currently in the unfortunate position of spending my time trying to find any job that I can (purely for financial reasons), I plan to educate myself more deeply on existing AI safety research and apply for fellowships on the topic heading into the next year. Ultimately, I hope to find myself working alongside a cohort of other like-minded people trying to solve these very hard problems.
If anyone has any broad advice for how they’d recommend that I deepen my knowledge on frontier AI safety research, I would love to hear it. I would also be interested in contributing to broader advocacy work; while it seems as though America’s current political environment makes the chances of the Trump administration taking any action to slow down AI development vanishingly unlikely, I do hold out some small hope that enough public awareness and outcry could convince the powers that be to do something.
Anyways, I look forward to contributing something worthwhile here one day. Thank you to the community for curating such a unique and important forum on an otherwise deeply irrational internet.
Hello all! I’ve been reading LessWrong consistently for a little while now, primarily on AI topics, and figured it would be worth making an account so that I can contribute to the excellent discussion space that exists here in the future.
I’m a 27yo tech worker, and while I am currently unemployed, I have prior experience working at companies like Meta and observing how attitudes towards AI have been developing in that particular environment. I’ve always been considered by my peers to be quite bright (high school valedictorian, near-perfect SATs, blah blah), and for much of my life I’ve grappled with what to point my mental capacity towards in order to feel like I was using it for something worthwhile. I would argue that, broadly, I have failed at this in my life thus far—I do not consider building more effective ads on Facebook to be a particularly worthwhile cause.
But over the last year or so, the discussion here on LW has thoroughly convinced me that AI safety and alignment is the single most important problem of our lifetimes and very arguably the most important problem in human history. As such, I feel an ethical compulsion to start steering my life in the direction of trying to do my part to aid humanity’s effort to control AI before it is too late. While I’m currently in the unfortunate position of spending my time trying to find any job that I can (purely for financial reasons), I plan to educate myself more deeply on existing AI safety research and apply for fellowships on the topic heading into the next year. Ultimately, I hope to find myself working alongside a cohort of other like-minded people trying to solve these very hard problems.
If anyone has any broad advice for how they’d recommend that I deepen my knowledge on frontier AI safety research, I would love to hear it. I would also be interested in contributing to broader advocacy work; while it seems as though America’s current political environment makes the chances of the Trump administration taking any action to slow down AI development vanishingly unlikely, I do hold out some small hope that enough public awareness and outcry could convince the powers that be to do something.
Anyways, I look forward to contributing something worthwhile here one day. Thank you to the community for curating such a unique and important forum on an otherwise deeply irrational internet.