Proposal: For critical EA-aligned jobs (e.g., AI safety research, policy advocacy, biosecurity), every position should have:
- A Primary Worker – Executing the role.
- An Automation Team – Dedicated to making the role obsolete via tools/AI.
Why This Could Work for EA:
- Focus on Scalability – Automating high-impact roles frees up talent for harder problems.
- Prioritization – Start with bottleneck areas (e.g., grantmaking, literature reviews).
- Resilience – If the primary worker leaves, automation fills gaps faster.
Challenges & Open Questions:
- Incentives – Would workers resist automating their own jobs? Could impact-weighted salaries help?
- Feasibility – Which EA orgs could pilot this (e.g., ops-heavy charities like GiveWell)?
- Risks – Premature automation might reduce quality (e.g., in research).
