Work on the world’s most pressing problems
Work on the world’s most pressing problems
We help people find fulfilling careers that make a big positive impact. Our career guide, 1-1 advising, and other resources can help you:
- Decide what problems to focus on
- Find and compare jobs that tackle those problems
- Enter your new role
Our resources are based on over 10 years of research, plus advising thousands of people 1-1 on their careers. We’re a nonprofit, and everything we provide is free.
High-impact careers in the age of AGI
There’s a real possibility that artificial general intelligence — AI systems that are as good or better than humans at most tasks — will be developed by 2030.
This would cause enormous change and pose extreme risks. So, if you want to have a high-impact career, we think you should urgently consider working on making things go well.
Many people — with a diverse range of skills and experience — are needed.
See why we think this, and what you can do to help:
Career guide
Our 12-part career guide explains how to find a fulfilling career that does good, from why you shouldn’t “follow your passion,” to why medicine and charity work aren’t always the best ways to help others.
It’s full of practical tips and exercises, and at the end, you’ll have a draft of your new career plan. Read the 2-minute summary, or:
1-1 career advising
If you’re interested in working on helping AGI go well, apply for a free 1-1 career advice call with our team.
We can:
- Help you decide whether to shift your focus
- Introduce you to experts at the forefront of technical research, policy, and other fields
- Review your options and suggest opportunities
The advising team is incredibly well-researched and connected in AI safety. Their advice is far more insightful, personalized, and impact-focused than most of what I got from Google, self-reflection, or the peers or mentors I would typically go to.
Ethan PerezResearch ScientistAnthropic
80,000 Hours advising showed me that I could pursue a career that was both ethically and personally rewarding. They showed me that my job horizons — and therefore opportunities to do good — were broader than I had thought, even with my heavy involvement in effective altruism.
Cullen O'KeefeDirector of ResearchInstitute for Law & AI
The advising team is incredibly well-researched and connected in AI safety. Their advice is far more insightful, personalized, and impact-focused than most of what I got from Google, self-reflection, or the peers or mentors I would typically go to.
Ethan PerezResearch ScientistAnthropic
80,000 Hours advising showed me that I could pursue a career that was both ethically and personally rewarding. They showed me that my job horizons — and therefore opportunities to do good — were broader than I had thought, even with my heavy involvement in effective altruism.
Cullen O'KeefeDirector of ResearchInstitute for Law & AI
What are the world’s most pressing problems?
The problem you work on is probably the largest factor in how big a difference you can make.
It helps to focus on issues that are large in scale, tractable, and unduly neglected by the rest of society.
Some of these issues may even threaten humanity’s future — making them especially high priority.
Here’s our (uncertain!) ranking of global problems where additional people can have the most impact:
What are the world’s most pressing problems?
The problem you work on is probably the largest factor in how big a difference you can make.
It helps to focus on issues that are large in scale, tractable, and unduly neglected by the rest of society.
Some of these issues may even threaten humanity’s future — making them especially high priority.
Here’s our (uncertain!) ranking of global problems where additional people can have the most impact:
Most pressing problems:
Risks from artificial intelligence Catastrophic pandemics Nuclear weapons Great power conflict Factory farming
Risks from artificial intelligence
Risks from artificial intelligence
Catastrophic pandemics
Nuclear weapons
Great power conflict
Factory farming
Most useful skills
Highest impact career paths
AI governance and policy
Technical AI safety research
Biorisk research, strategy, & policy
Information security
Expert in AI hardware
China-related AI safety and governance
Grantmaking
Building the effective altruism community
Nuclear weapons safety
Operations at high-impact orgs
Research into global prioritiesLatest releases
Job board
We curate job listings that help you work on pressing global problems. On our job board, you’ll find:
Podcast Podcast
# 151
Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us# 72
Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futures# 204
Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism# 194
Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government# 145
Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable# 67
David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness# 189
Rachel Glennerster on how "market shaping" could help solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems# 179
Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
# 151
# 72
# 204
# 194
Reader stories
About 80,000 Hours
Who is this for?
Our aim is to help people effectively tackle the world's biggest and most neglected problems, and our advice is aimed at people who have the good fortune to be able to do that. Due to limited capacity, some of our advice focuses on a narrow range of paths and is especially aimed at talented and ambitious people who are able to make positive impact a focus of their careers, though many of our resources are relevant to everyone.
How is this free?
We're an independent nonprofit funded by individual donors and philanthropic foundations. They donate to us so that we can help people have a greater positive impact on the world. We don't accept any corporate sponsorships or advertising fees.
FAQs
We help people — and maybe you — use their careers to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
We do that by providing in-depth research and resources on top problems and how you can use your career to address them.
What we offer:
- Our online research, which includes:
- Our career guide, covering our core advice
- Our profiles of pressing world problems
- Our reviews of high-impact career paths
- Our articles on valuable skills
- And many other articles and publications
- Our podcast — in-depth interviews about the world’s most pressing problems, and how you can help solve them
- Our job board — with current opportunities to work on big and neglected problems and build skills
- Our one-on-one service — providing individualised career advice for our more engaged readers, helping them make concrete plans and important career connections, and matching some users to key high-impact roles
We recommend starting with our career guide, which will help you get ideas, form a plan, and put it into action.
- Our online research, which includes:
Start with our career guide.
Or if you want something even shorter, we wrote a two-minute summary with the key takeaways.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to read everything to make use of our advice! Just pick what you’re most interested in, and go from there.
Roughly speaking, the positive impact of your career depends on how many people (or other ‘moral patients‘) you help, how much you help them, and how long the effects last.
If you’d like a more precise answer, see our full article on how to define doing good.
Lots of career advice isn’t based on much more than opinion and personal anecdotes. We try to do better by drawing on:
- Our experience from career advising calls with over five thousand people
- More than a decade of researching, interviewing experts, and writing about high-impact careers
- The best available research and academic literature — including advice from relevant experts and professionals, such as hiring managers
- Research on decision making
Ultimately, though, you shouldn’t just take our word for it — we’re probably wrong in lots of ways, and have changed our views over time. That’s why we try to be transparent about our reasoning, so you can make up your own mind.
Our list of pressing global problems sets out the problems where we think our readers can have the biggest positive impact by working on them.
We prioritise problems that are unusually large in scale, unduly neglected, and solvable — because that’s where additional people can generally have the most positive impact.
Right now, problems that could pose existential risks top our list, because they threaten not just those alive today but also humanity’s entire future, and they remain neglected relative to their scale.
In particular, we think that there’s a realistic possibility of transformative AI in the coming decades. We think addressing risks from this transformative technology may be the most pressing problem in the world.
Our ranking is a best guess and a constant work in progress, meaning it’s undoubtedly incomplete and mistaken in many ways. It also may not align with your worldview. So we encourage you to think through the question of which problems are most pressing for yourself too. Where you focus will also depend on your opportunities to contribute to each issue.
To learn why we listed a specific problem and how you can help tackle it, read the full profile for yourself.
We’ve been talking about risks from advanced AI since 2014, and we’ve ranked it as the world’s most pressing problem since 2016.
In recent years, AI has made enormous progress and continues to advance, and we’re worried that society isn’t on track to tackle the risks.
We think advanced AI systems could:
- Worsen great power conflict
- Empower dangerous actors, like terrorists or dictators
- Become power-seeking on their own and disempower humanity
- Otherwise lead to significant harms
In short, the harms are potentially catastrophic and approaching quickly — and not enough is being done about them.
We’re not sure exactly how advanced AI will develop, but companies are racing fast to build it, and world governments and individuals can hardly keep up — so the window to influence its trajectory might be closing.
We think more people should probably be paying attention and trying to help influence the development of AI for the better while curtailing the worst risks.
Read more in our problem profile on risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
We’re a nonprofit, and our work is fully funded by donors, whom we list here.
Our goal is to make as much progress on the world’s most pressing problems as possible, and by making our advice free, we can reach more people.
We don’t take any corporate sponsorship or run ads in our content, which helps us avoid bias. We also never sell user data, and don’t have any hidden fees or charges.
That depends!
We think lots of our advice — such as our career guide — will be useful for anyone who is interested in doing more good with their career, or even just curious.
That said, our aim is to help people tackle the world’s biggest and most neglected problems. So, our advice is primarily aimed at people who have the good fortune to be able to focus on that, and who have the security to change paths.
Due to our limited capacity, some of our advice focuses on a narrow range of paths, which can be competitive and demanding.
If you’re not able to change your career right now, see our advice on how to have a big impact without changing your job, through advocacy, political engagement, and donations.
Many people are not in a position to prioritise social impact, let alone make it a central focus, and that’s fine — we also have many priorities in life besides impact. But if you do want to make a big difference, we hope we can help.
Yes!
Because we have limited capacity to speak to people, we aren’t able to have a call with everyone who applies. But the application form only takes 10 minutes! So it’s worth filling out for most people — and if we don’t speak to you this time, you can always apply again in six months.
We’re looking to speak with people who:
- Make social impact one of their main career goals
- Take an analytical approach to social impact and career choice
- Are already somewhat familiar with the basic principles presented in our career guide
- Are interested in working on our pressing problems, especially helping mitigate risks from AI or other pressing problems exacerbated by AI
- Have the ability to excel in a challenging career
We speak to people at all stages of their career, and you don’t need to already know exactly what you want to work on, or have a preexisting career plan.
If that sounds like you, then you should definitely apply!
That’s what our whole site is all about!
And yes, it’s not an easy question, but we’re here to help you answer it.
Start by reading our career guide (or this two-minute summary). It will guide you through the rest.
Alternatively, if you just want to browse possible high-impact career paths, you can check out our career reviews.
Build useful skills, and then use them to tackle pressing global problems.
This might sound obvious — but in practice, very few people do this.
Many efforts to do good are far less effective than they could be, because they aren’t focused on the problems where additional effort has the biggest impact. See more in our problem profiles.
