Software engineering comprises the entire range of activities used to design and develop software.
80,000 Hours' in-depth profile rates software engineering a "sometimes recommended" career.[1] The profile finds that a software engineer's most promising path to impact involves doing direct work on AI safety or in highly impactful organizations, and that the value of this work is likely higher than via earning to give. A career in software engineering can also be a good way to gain career capital.
I gave talk about my Accelerating Alignment with LLMs agenda about 1 month ago (which is basically a decade in AI tools time). Part of the agenda covered (publicly) here.
I will maybe write an actual post about the agenda soon, but would love to have some people who are willing to look over it. If you are interested, send me a message. I am currently applying for grants and exploring the possibility of building an org focused on speeding up this agenda and avoid spreading myself too thin.
"The AI Dilemma" presentation by Center for Humane Technology: specifically the speakers Tristan Harris and Asa Raskin is the most compelling case for slowing down and getting more cautious “moving at the speed of getting it right” with generative AI I’ve heard. How might we get more people to give it a listen? https://pod.link/1460030305/episode/f4415952ef979f94cf5a55e19fc80bd8
What about making and promoting a ‘how much does it cost to save a life’ quiz and calculator.
This could be adjustable/customizable (in my country, around the world, of an infant/child/adult, counting ‘value added life years’ etc.) … and trying to make it go viral (or at least bacterial) as in the ‘how rich am I’ calculator?
The case
While GiveWell has a page with a lot of tech details, but it’s not compelling or interactive in the way I suggest above, and I doubt they market it heavily.
GWWC probably doesn't have the design/engineering time for this (not to mention refining this for accuracy and communication). But if someone else (UX design, research support, IT) could do the legwork I think they might be very happy to host it.
It could also mesh well with academic-linked research so I may have some ‘Meta academic support ads’ funds that could work with this.
Tags/backlinks (~testing out this new feature)
@GiveWell @Giving What We Can
Projects I'd like to see
EA Projects I'd Like to See
Idea: Curated database of quick-win tangible, attributable projects
Jobst and I want to improve AI-safety by supplementing RLHF with a consensus generating voting system. Last week we did a small experiment at a conference. Here is the poster we used to explain this idea to the attendants:
Here's the PDF