I believe you left another important reason why it's okay not to go into AI: because it's okay to think that the risk of AI is wildly overblown. I'm worried that EA might be unwittingly drifting into a community where  AI skeptics feel unwelcome and just leave (or never join in the first place), which is obviously bad for intellectual discourse, even if you think they are wrong.  

(It's also okay for non-students to not go into AI safety. :) )

I agree with the statement "It's OK for some people not to go into AI" but strongly disagree with the statement "It's OK not to go into AI, even if you don't have a good reason". One can list increasingly unreasonable statements like:

1. AI safety is an important problem.
2. Every EA should either work on AI safety or have a good reason why they're not.
3. EAs should introduce themselves with what cause area they're working on, and their reason for not working on AI if applicable.
4. Literally everyone should work on AI safety; there are no excuses not to.

I want to remind people of (1) and defend something between (2) and (3).

Our goal as world optimizers is to find the best thing we could possibly be doing, subject to various constraints like non-consequentialist goals and limited information. This means that for every notable action worth considering, we should have a good reason why we're not doing it. And (2) is just a special case of this, since working on alignment (technical or otherwise) is definitely a notable action. Because there are good reasons to work on AI safety, you need to have a better reason not to.

• Having 100x more traction on the problem of making Malawi (0.25% of the world population) a developed country is not a good enough reason, because under most reasonable moral views, preventing human extinction is >100x better than raising the standard of living of 0.25% of the world population.
  • Note that there are many people who should not work on AI safety because they have >400x more traction on problems 400x smaller, or whatever.
• Wanting to expand what EA thinks is possible is not a sufficient reason, because you also have to argue that the expected value of this is higher than investing into causes we already know about.
  • Holden Karnofsky makes the case against "cause X" here: AI risk is already really large in scale; they essentially say "this century we’re going to figure out what kind of civilization is going to tile the entire galaxy", and it's hard to find something larger in scale than that; x-risks are also neglected. It's hard for tractability differences to overwhelm large differences in scale/neglectedness.
• Not having thought about the arguments is not a good enough reason. Reality is the judge of your actions and takes no excuses.
• Majoring in something other than math/CS is not a good enough reason, because your current skills or interest areas don't completely determine your career comparative advantage
• Finding the arguments for AI risk unconvincing is not a reason to just not work on AI risk, because if the arguments are wrong, this implies lots of effort on alignment is wasted and we need to shift billions of dollars away from it (and if they have nonessential flaws this could change research directions within alignment), so you should write counterarguments up to allow the EA community to correctly allocate its resources.
  • also, if working on alignment is your comparative advantage, it might make sense to work on even if the arguments have a 10% chance of being right.
• Some potential sufficient reasons
  • "I tried 3 different kinds of AI safety research and was worse than useless at all of them, and have various reasons not to do longtermist community-building either"
  • "I have 100x more traction on biorisk and think biorisk is 20x smaller than AI risk"
  • "I have 100x more traction on making the entire continent of Africa as developed as the USA, plus person-affecting views, plus my AI timelines are long enough that I can make a difference before AGI happens"
  • "I think suffering-focused ethics are correct, so I would rather prevent suffering now than have a small chance of preventing human extinction"
  • "I can become literally the best X in the world, or a mediocre AI safety community-builder. I think the
  • "I have a really good story for why the arguments for AI risk are wrong and have spent the last month finding the strongest version of my counterarguments; this will direct lots of resources to preventing various moral atrocities in worlds where I am right"

edit: after thinking about it more I don't endorse the below paragraph

I also want to defend (3) to some extent. Introducing yourself with your target cause area and reasons for working on it seems like a pretty natural and good thing. In particular it forces you to have a good reason for doing what you're doing. But there are other benefits too: it's an obvious conversation starter, and when half the people at the EA event are working on AI safety it just carries a lot of information.

There seems to be a "intentions don't matter, results do" lesson that's relevant here. Intending to solve AI alignment is secondary, and doesn't mean that you're making progress on the problem.

And we don't want people saying "I'm working on AI" just for the social status, if that's not their comparative advantage and they're not actually being productive.

I've been running EA events in San Francisco every other month, and often I will meet a recent graduate, and as part of their introduction they will explain to me why they are or aren't working on AI stuff.

The other day, I had my first conversation ever where someone explained why they weren't sure about going into AI, unprompted. I said something like "no need to justify yourself, EA is a big tent", which felt like the obvious thing to say (given all my experiences in the movement, meeting people who work on a dozen different problems). If some groups have atmospheres where AI self-justification feels important,  that seems bad.

(Though I think "explaining why you work on X" is very different than "explaining why you don't work on X, not so much"; the former seems fine/natural.)

*****

Related: an old post of mine on why being world-class at some arbitrary thing could be more impactful than being just okay at a high-priority career.

That post is way too long, but in short, benefits to having a diverse set of world-class people in EA include:

• Wide-ranging connections to many different groups of people (including skilled people who can contribute to valuable work and successful people who have strong networks/influence)
• EA being a more interesting movement for the people in it + people who might join

I think this is directionally right relative to my impression of the attitudes on the ground in today's effective altruism local groups. I also directionally agree with Thomas Kwa's pushback below relative to your post. 

EDIT:
If you don't think that more people should go into AI as a community-builder, you should not indicate you think people need a reason to not go into AI! 

People who don't have their own views should feel very comfortable saying that it's fine to not have a view yet! 

More detail in the footnote. ^[1]
END OF EDIT

My actual overall take is that I think it is good that more people are taking the idea of going into AI seriously.  I also think it's incredibly important that the conclusion doesn't feel pre-written because that is so counter-productive to attracting the most inquisitive and curious minds who do feel like there are plenty of reasonable objections.

 The less people feel free to explore the objections, the more we accidently select for people who are willing to believe stuff without thinking hard about it themselves. The more people feel like they belong in this group of people regardless of whether they end up coming to a particular conclusion, the healthier our local groups' epistemics are likely to be. People need to feel free to accept "AI" and "not-AI" to think clearly about this. 

Huge amounts of social pressure to come to a certain conclusion about the state of the world is bound to end in more yes-people and less people who are deeply curious about how to help others the most.

It is challenging to push certain "most promising candidates" while still making everyone else who thinks really hard and has a nuanced understanding of effective altruism and decides "I've thought really hard about it and that/none of those seem like my best option" to feel they fully belong in an effective altruism local group. 

1. ^{^}

    If you think AI is worth mentioning anyway/it's worth people you talk to thinking more seriously about it for other reasons, I think it is good to be upfront about exactly what you think and why. 
   
   Example of how to be upfront and why I think this is so important in community building 
   
   EG. "I honestly haven't formed a view on AI yet. I think it's worth mentioning as something worth looking into anyway. The reason I think this is because people who I think generally have robust reasons for thinking what they do who I agree with on other topics I've thought about more, think AI is a big deal.  This makes me suspect I'll end up thinking AI is important even if I don't fully buy into the arguments at the moment.". 
   
   This community builder could then go onto discuss exactly who they respect and what idea they have that made them respect them. This then brings the conversation to things the community builder in question actually believes and they can passionately and inspirationally discuss that topic. 
   
    I think great community building conversations I've had with people new to the community happen when:
   
   1. I change my mind;

   2. they change their mind;

   3. we realise we actually agree but were using different words to express it (and now both of us have more language to express our views to a wider range of people). 
   
    If I am summarising someone else's view and I don't make that clear, it is very hard for me to move the conversation onto something where one of the three above things happen. If neither I nor the person I'm talking to has fleshed out views on something (because I'm deferring and they have never thought about it before), this is much less likely to be the sort of conversation that builds more nuance into either of our views on the topic. 
   
   My initial mistake
   My mistake initially when writing this comment was forgetting that I currently have enough views on AI (but I didn't always) to have these sorts of conversations so I should engage with people's reasoning and encourage them to flesh out their views if someone says this to me. 
   
   I still think that I should absolutely give people permission to take time to come to a view and not have a reason other than "I haven't thought about it enough to have a confident view" and that I also should not force people to talk about AI if they don't want to!
   
   Just if they're bringing it up, which is what is happening in the context of this post, then I think it's good for me, in that situation, to engage with their chosen topic of conversation with their thinking and my thinking to see if we can start charting out the common ground and figuring out what the points of disagreement are.
   
   When I didn't have my own views on AI, I believed it was worth mentioning because other people thought it was worth mentioning. I hope I was able to be upfront about this when talking about AI but I know that memory paints a rosier picture in retrospect. 
   
   I can imagine myself having glossed over why I didn't go into detail on AI when I didn't have detailed views because of cultural pressures to appear like effective altruism, and me as its representative, have everything figured out. I think that not being upfront about not buying into the arguments would have been a bad way of handling it because then it makes it seem like I buy into it and can't make a nuanced case for it! 
   
    There are certainly components of the AI case that I don't have views on and if we hit those I think it's good for me to be really upfront. I also have quite shallow views on biorisk, extreme climate change and nuclear weapons (but really in-depth views about a bunch of other topics).  I think that it is very hard to develop your own view on every topic and it takes a lot of time -- I think deferring to people who I think think well is often necessary, but it is simply important for me, and for us all, to be as upfront as possible. Being upfront about when we're deferring and when we buy-in to the arguments for something is so helpful for community building conversations to go as well as they possibly can go.   

I sometimes introduce myself by apologetically explaining why I am working on AI safety given that so many other people are seemingly doing the same. The general lesson is that we should just do what we think needs to get done without feeling a need to apologise for it. Virtue points to anyone working on anything that they think other people will think they aren't qualified for. Virtue points to those who feel peer-pressured to work on something but choose a different path.

Strongly agree. Thanks for writing this!