While EA has always been rather demanding, it never felt as urgent as it does today. While it always seemed tremendously beneficial to contribute to immediately preventing the further transmission of Malaria, or reducing carbon emissions, or addressing other long term issues, the opportunity to do so never felt like it would disappear in the future, allowing for long term investments in oneself, like going to college.
However, AI has changed this. Based on most indications from industry experts, and prediction markets, it seems both like AI is advancing faster than previous expectations, and that AGI is rapidly approaching. Manifold gives about a 48% of AGI being developed before 2028[1], Metaculus [2] has a median estimate by 2030, and many public figures associated with AI have revised their timelines upwards[3][4].
I am currently in the undergraduate class of '28, and I honestly do not know what to do. If I just continue my trajectory as a CS major, the job market I face upon graduation may be hyper competitive to enter into due to advances in current AI alone (much less AGI). Honestly, I am now highly considering dropping out of college, or at least switching majors. What do you think?
I would really like to help the cause of AI safety, but I don't feel like I have the potential to be a genius AI researcher, and at the earliest I would be able to get a PHD in 2031. Maybe certain AI safety charities would be valuable to donate to?
Not an answer to your original question, but beware taking answers to the Metaculus question as reflecting when AGI will arrive, if by "AGI" you mean AI that will rapidly transform the world, or be able to perform literally every task humans perform as well as almost all humans. If you look at the resolution criteria for the question, all it requires for the answer to be yes, is that there is a model able to pass 4 specific hard benchmarks. Passing a benchmark is not the same as performing well at all aspects of an actual human office or lab job. Furthermore, none of these benchmarks actually require being able to store memories long-term and act coherently on a time scale of weeks, two of the main things current models lack. It is a highly substantial assumption that any AI which can pass the Turing test, do well on a test of subject matter knowledge, code like a top human over relatively small time scales, and put together a complicated model car can do every economically significant task, or succeed in carrying out plans long-term, or have enough commonsense and adapatibility in practice to fully replace a white-collar middle manager or a plumber.
Not that this means you shouldn't be thinking about how to optimize your career for an age where AI can do a lot of tasks currently done by humans, or even that AGI isn't imminent. But people using that particular Metaculus question to say "see, completely human-level or above on everything transformative AI" is coming soon, when that doesn't really match the resolution criteria, is a pet hate of mine.
I agree on the Metaculus prompt being unclear, but the manifold market is far more clear. For the purposes of resolution:
“Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a type of artificial intelligence that has the ability to understand, learn, and apply its intelligence to a wide variety of problems, much like a human being. Unlike narrow or weak AI, which is designed and trained for specific tasks (like language translation, playing a game, or image recognition), AGI can theoretically perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It invol... (read more)