New releases

We’ve made mistakes in our careers — here’s what we learned

Blog post by · Published October 6, 2023

The idea this week: you can learn a lot from mistakes.

In that spirit, we’re sharing six stories of mistakes that staff at 80,000 Hours think they’ve made in their careers.

And if you’re interested in hearing more, we strongly recommend a recent episode of our podcast, 80k After Hours, about 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career.

1. Not asking for help

A mistake I have frequently made, and still sometimes do, is not asking for help with applications. I usually feel awkward about others reading my letters or essays or practicing interview questions, and I also don’t want to waste my friends’ time.

But whenever I end up asking for help, it improves my applications significantly, and people are usually happy to help. (I enjoy giving feedback on applications as well!)

–Anemone Franz, advisor

2. Ruling out an option too quickly

I first became concerned about risks from artificial intelligence in 2014, when I read Superintelligence. The book convinced me these risks were serious. And more importantly, I couldn’t find persuasive counterarguments at the time.

But because I didn’t have a background in technical fields — I thought of myself as a writer — I concluded there was little I could contribute to the field and mostly worked on other problems.

Now I think this was a mistake.

Continue reading →

#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives

Podcast by and · Published October 2, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Kevin Esvelt — a biologist at the MIT Media Lab and the inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive — about the threat posed by engineered bioweapons.

They cover:

  • Why it makes sense to focus on deliberately released pandemics
  • Case studies of people who actually wanted to kill billions of humans
  • How many people have the technical ability to produce dangerous viruses
  • The different threats of stealth and wildfire pandemics that could crash civilisation
  • The potential for AI models to increase access to dangerous pathogens
  • Why scientists try to identify new pandemic-capable pathogens, and the case against that research
  • Technological solutions, including UV lights and advanced PPE
  • Using CRISPR-based gene drive to fight diseases and reduce animal suffering
  • And plenty more.

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Building career capital: some new advice on three paths

Blog post by · Published September 29, 2023

The idea this week: building career capital is a key part of having an impactful career over the long term — and we have new content about some specific paths you might take.

If you want to do good with your career, we usually don’t recommend trying to have an impact right away. We think most people should spend their early career getting good at something useful.

Here’s some of our new content on specific ways to potentially build career capital:

1. US policy master’s degrees

We recently published an in-depth review of US policy master’s degrees.

Working in policy can be an excellent way to have a positive impact on many top problems, including AI, biosecurity, great power conflict, animal welfare, global health, and more.

The first part details the value of policy master’s degrees with a focus on the US — though some of the information is likely to apply more broadly. We think this is one of the best ways to get career capital for a career in US policy.

The second part covers specifics about how to choose which program to apply to based on reputation and personal fit, advice for preparing your application, and information on how to fund your degree.

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What you should know about our updated career guide

Blog post by · Published September 19, 2023

The question this week: what are the biggest changes to our career guide since 2017?

  • Read the new and updated career guide here, by our founder Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team.

Our 2023 career guide isn’t just a fancy new design — here’s a rundown of how the content has been updated:

1. Career capital: get good at something useful

In our previous career guide, we argued that your primary focus should be on building very broadly applicable skills, credentials, and connections — what we called transferable career capital.

We also highlighted jobs like consulting as a way to get this.

However, since launching the 2017 version of the career guide, we came to think a focus on transferable career capital might lead you to neglect experience that can be very useful to enter the most impactful jobs — for example, experience working in an AI lab or studying synthetic biology.

OK, so how should you figure out the best career capital option for you?

Our new advice: get good at something useful.

In more depth — choose some valuable skills to learn, and that are a good fit for you, and then find opportunities that let you practise those skills. And then have concrete back-up plans and plan Bs in mind,

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#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do

Podcast by and · Published September 8, 2023

Effective altruism is associated with the slogan “do the most good.” On one level, this has to be unobjectionable: What could be bad about helping people more and more?

But in today’s interview, Toby Ord — moral philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the founding figures of effective altruism — lays out three reasons to be cautious about the idea of maximising the good that you do. He suggests that rather than “doing the most good that we can,” perhaps we should be happy with a more modest and manageable goal: “doing most of the good that we can.”

Toby was inspired to revisit these ideas by the possibility that Sam Bankman-Fried, who stands accused of committing severe fraud as CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was motivated to break the law by a desire to give away as much money as possible to worthy causes.

Toby’s top reason not to fully maximise is the following: if the goal you’re aiming at is subtly wrong or incomplete, then going all the way towards maximising it will usually cause you to start doing some very harmful things.

This result can be shown mathematically, but can also be made intuitive, and may explain why we feel instinctively wary of going “all-in” on any idea, or goal, or way of living — even something as benign as helping other people as much as possible.

Toby gives the example of someone pursuing a career as a professional swimmer. Initially, as our swimmer takes their training and performance more seriously, they adjust their diet, hire a better trainer, and pay more attention to their technique. While swimming is the main focus of their life, they feel fit and healthy and also enjoy other aspects of their life as well — family, friends, and personal projects.

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Open positions: 1on1 team

Blog post by · Published September 7, 2023

We’re looking for candidates to join our 1on1 team.

The 1on1 team at 80,000 Hours talks to people who want to have a positive impact in their work and helps them find career paths tackling the world’s most pressing problems. We’re keen to expand our team by hiring people who can help with at least one (and hopefully more!) of the following responsibilities:

  • Advising: talking one-on-one to talented and altruistic applicants in order to help them find high-impact careers.
  • Running our headhunting product: working with hiring managers at the most effective organisations to help them find exceptional employees.
  • Improving our systems: building tech-based systems to support our team members.

If you think you’d be interested in taking on more than one of these duties, and enjoy wearing multiple hats in your job, we strongly encourage you to apply. The start dates of these roles are flexible, although we’re likely to prioritise candidates who can start sooner, all else equal.

These roles have starting salaries from £50,000 to £85,000 (depending on skills and experience) and are ideally London-based. We’re able to sponsor visa applications.

About 80,000 Hours

Our mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems by providing them with excellent support, advice, and resources on how to do so.

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Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career

Podcast (80k After Hours) by , , and · Published September 2023

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Alex Lawsen discuss common mistakes people make when trying to do good with their careers, and advice on how to avoid them.

They cover:

  • Taking 80,000 Hours’ rankings too seriously
  • Not trying hard enough to fail
  • Feeling like you need to optimise for having the most impact now
  • Feeling like you need to work directly on AI immediately
  • Not taking a role because you think you’ll be replaceable
  • Constantly considering other career options
  • Overthinking or over-optimising career choices
  • Being unwilling to think things through for yourself
  • Ignoring conventional career wisdom
  • Doing community work even if you’re not suited to it

Who this episode is for:

  • People who want to pursue a high-impact career
  • People wondering how much AI progress should change their plans
  • People who take 80,000 Hours’ career advice seriously

Who this episode isn’t for:

  • People not taking 80k’s career advice seriously enough
  • People who’ve never made any career mistakes
  • People who don’t want to hear Alex say “I said a bunch of stuff, maybe some of it’s true” every time he’s on the podcast

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Announcing the new 80,000 Hours career guide

Blog post by · Published September 4, 2023

From 2016 to 2019, 80,000 Hours’ core content was contained in our persistently popular career guide. (You may also remember it as the 80,000 Hours book: 80,000 Hours — Find a fulfilling career that does good).

Today, we’re re-launching that guide. Among many other changes, in the new version:

You can read the guide here or start with a 2-minute summary.

What’s in the guide?

The career guide aims to cover the most important basic concepts in career planning. (If instead you’d like to see something more in-depth,

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#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI

Podcast by and · Published September 1, 2023

Mustafa Suleyman was part of the trio that founded DeepMind, and his new AI project is building one of the world’s largest supercomputers to train a large language model on 10–100x the compute used to train ChatGPT.

But far from the stereotype of the incorrigibly optimistic tech founder, Mustafa is deeply worried about the future, for reasons he lays out in his new book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma (coauthored with Michael Bhaskar). The future could be really good, but only if we grab the bull by the horns and solve the new problems technology is throwing at us.

On Mustafa’s telling, AI and biotechnology will soon be a huge aid to criminals and terrorists, empowering small groups to cause harm on previously unimaginable scales. Democratic countries have learned to walk a ‘narrow path’ between chaos on the one hand and authoritarianism on the other, avoiding the downsides that come from both extreme openness and extreme closure. AI could easily destabilise that present equilibrium, throwing us off dangerously in either direction. And ultimately, within our lifetimes humans may not need to work to live any more — or indeed, even have the option to do so.

And those are just three of the challenges confronting us. In Mustafa’s view, ‘misaligned’ AI that goes rogue and pursues its own agenda won’t be an issue for the next few years, and it isn’t a problem for the current style of large language models. But he thinks that at some point — in eight, ten, or twelve years — it will become an entirely legitimate concern, and says that we need to be planning ahead.

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What the past can tell us about how AI will affect jobs

Blog post by · Published September 1, 2023

The idea this week: AI may be progressing fast — but that doesn’t mean it will rapidly transform the economy in the near term.

Large language models like ChatGPT are becoming more and more powerful and capable. We’ve already started to see a few examples where human workers are plausibly being replaced by AI.

As these models get even more skilled, will they substantially replace human workers? What will happen to the labour market?

To try to answer these questions, I spoke to labour economist Michael Webb, for the latest episode of The 80,000 Hours Podcast. He’s worked for Google DeepMind, in the UK government, and at Stanford University.

Michael argues that new technologies typically take many decades to fully replace specific jobs.

For example, if you look at two of the biggest general-purpose technologies of the last 150 years — robots and software — it took 30 years from the invention of each technology to get to 50% adoption.

It took 90 years for the last manual telephone operator to lose their job from automation.

a switchboard

So if we look to the past as a guide, it may suggest that if AI systems do replace human workers, it will take many decades. But why does it take so long for very obviously useful technologies to be widely adopted?

Continue reading →

Why you might consider switching careers — and what it takes to do it

Blog post by · Published August 29, 2023

The idea this week: switching careers can be terrifying — but it can also be the key to finding more satisfying and impactful work.

Trust me — I’ve tested my fit for at least four different career paths before landing where I am now. After a first job in teaching, I explored:

When I graduated from university with a degree in philosophy, I didn’t know what to do next, but I knew I wanted to find a job that helped others and wasn’t harmful. I looked for roles at nonprofits nearby and ended up getting hired at a special education school.

I loved many parts of the job and the students I worked with, but when the opportunity arose to get my master’s in special education, I realised I didn’t envision spending my whole career in the field. I had gotten involved with local vegan advocacy and an effective altruism group, and I was curious if there were even more impactful opportunities I could pursue with my career.

I once thought that most of my impact would come through donating — but a lot of the people I was talking to were discussing the idea that career choice could be even more impactful than charitable giving (especially since teaching wasn’t particularly lucrative in my case).

Continue reading →

#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite

Podcast by , , and · Published August 23, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews economist Michael Webb of DeepMind, the British Government, and Stanford about how AI progress is going to affect people’s jobs and the labour market.

They cover:

  • The jobs most and least exposed to AI
  • Whether we’ll we see mass unemployment in the short term
  • How long it took other technologies like electricity and computers to have economy-wide effects
  • Whether AI will increase or decrease inequality
  • Whether AI will lead to explosive economic growth
  • What we can we learn from history, and reasons to think this time is different
  • Career advice for a world of LLMs
  • Why Michael is starting a new org to relieve talent bottlenecks through accelerated learning, and how you can get involved
  • Michael’s take as a musician on AI-generated music
  • And plenty more

If you’d like to work with Michael on his new org to radically accelerate how quickly people acquire expertise in critical cause areas, he’s now hiring! Check out Quantum Leap’s website.

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#160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment

Podcast by , and · Published August 14, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews the head of research at Our World in Data — Hannah Ritchie — on the case for environmental optimism.

They cover:

  • Why agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa could be so important, and how much better things could get
  • Her new book about how we could be the first generation to build a sustainable planet
  • Whether climate change is the most worrying environmental issue
  • How we reduced outdoor air pollution
  • Why Hannah is worried about the state of biodiversity
  • Solutions that address multiple environmental issues at once
  • How the world coordinated to address the hole in the ozone layer
  • Surprises from Our World in Data’s research
  • Psychological challenges that come up in Hannah’s work
  • And plenty more

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Operations management: how I found the right career path for me

Blog post by · Published August 11, 2023

The idea this week: how I learned a lot about my skills by testing my fit for operations work.

Like a lot of students, I spent much of my final year at university unsure what to do next. Should I pursue further studies, start out on a career path, or something else?

I was excited about having an impact with my career, and I thought I might be a good fit for policy work — which seemed like a way I could contribute to solving pressing world problems. I figured this would involve further studies, so I looked into applying for graduate school.

But I was probably deferring too much to my sense of what others thought would be high-impact work, rather than figuring out how I could best contribute over the course of my career. I ended up doing the 80,000 Hours career planning worksheet — and it helped me to generate a longer list of options and questions.

It pointed me toward something I hadn’t considered: doing something that would help me test my fit for lots of different kinds of work.

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#159 – Jan Leike on OpenAI’s massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less

Podcast by and · Published August 7, 2023

In July, OpenAI announced a new team and project: Superalignment. The goal is to figure out how to make superintelligent AI systems aligned and safe to use within four years, and the lab is putting a massive 20% of its computational resources behind the effort.

Today’s guest, Jan Leike, is Head of Alignment at OpenAI and will be co-leading the project. As OpenAI puts it, “…the vast power of superintelligence could be very dangerous, and lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. … Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue.”

Given that OpenAI is in the business of developing superintelligent AI, it sees that as a scary problem that urgently has to be fixed. So it’s not just throwing compute at the problem — it’s also hiring dozens of scientists and engineers to build out the Superalignment team.

Plenty of people are pessimistic that this can be done at all, let alone in four years. But Jan is guardedly optimistic. As he explains:

Honestly, it really feels like we have a real angle of attack on the problem that we can actually iterate on… and I think it’s pretty likely going to work, actually. And that’s really, really wild, and it’s really exciting. It’s like we have this hard problem that we’ve been talking about for years and years and years, and now we have a real shot at actually solving it. And that’d be so good if we did.

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What recent events mean for AI governance career paths

Blog post by · Published August 7, 2023

The idea this week: AI governance careers present some of the best opportunities to change the world for the better that we’ve found.

Last week, US Senator Richard Blumenthal gave a stark warning during a subcommittee hearing on artificial intelligence.

He’s become deeply concerned about the potential for an “intelligence device out of control, autonomous, self-replicating, potentially creating diseases, pandemic-grade viruses, or other kinds of evils — purposely engineered by people, or simply the result of mistakes, no malign intention.”

We’ve written about these kinds of dangers — potentially rising to the extreme of an extinction-level event — in our problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe.

“These fears need to be addressed, and I think can be addressed,” the senator continued. “I’ve come to the conclusion that we need some kind of regulatory agency.”

And the senator from Connecticut isn’t the only one:

  • The White House has led a coalition of the top AI companies to coordinate on risk-reducing measures, and they recently announced a joint voluntary commitment to some key safety principles. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been directly involved in these efforts, with the president himself saying the technology will require “new laws, regulation, and oversight.”
  • Four top companies developing advanced AI systems — Anthropic,

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#158 – Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they’re no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk

Podcast by and · Published July 31, 2023

Back in 2007, Holden Karnofsky cofounded GiveWell, where he sought out the charities that most cost-effectively helped save lives. He then cofounded Open Philanthropy, where he oversaw a team making billions of dollars’ worth of grants across a range of areas: pandemic control, criminal justice reform, farmed animal welfare, and making AI safe, among others. This year, having learned about AI for years and observed recent events, he’s narrowing his focus once again, this time on making the transition to advanced AI go well.

In today’s conversation, Holden returns to the show to share his overall understanding of the promise and the risks posed by machine intelligence, and what to do about it. That understanding has accumulated over around 14 years, during which he went from being sceptical that AI was important or risky, to making AI risks the focus of his work.

(As Holden reminds us, his wife is also the president of one of the world’s top AI labs, Anthropic, giving him both conflicts of interest and a front-row seat to recent events. For our part, Open Philanthropy is 80,000 Hours’ largest financial supporter.)

One point he makes is that people are too narrowly focused on AI becoming ‘superintelligent.’ While that could happen and would be important, it’s not necessary for AI to be transformative or perilous. Rather, machines with human levels of intelligence could end up being enormously influential simply if the amount of computer hardware globally were able to operate tens or hundreds of billions of them, in a sense making machine intelligences a majority of the global population, or at least a majority of global thought.

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Why many people underrate investigating the problem they work on

Blog post by · Published July 31, 2023

The idea this week: thinking about which world problem is most pressing may matter more than you realise.

I’m an advisor for 80,000 Hours, which means I talk to a lot of thoughtful people who genuinely want to have a positive impact with their careers. One piece of advice I consistently find myself giving is to consider working on pressing world problems you might not have explored yet.

Should you work on climate change or AI risk? Mitigating antibiotic resistance or preventing bioterrorism? Preventing disease in low-income countries or reducing the harms of factory farming?

Your choice of problem area can matter a lot. But I think a lot of people under-invest in building a view of which problems they think are most pressing.

I think there are three main reasons for this:

1. They think they can’t get a job working on a certain problem, so the argument that it’s important doesn’t seem relevant.

I see this most frequently with AI. People think that they don’t have aptitude or interest in machine learning, so they wouldn’t be able to contribute to mitigating catastrophic risks from AI.

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#157 – Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it

Podcast by and · Published July 24, 2023

In Oppenheimer, scientists detonate a nuclear weapon despite thinking there’s some ‘near zero’ chance it would ignite the atmosphere, putting an end to life on Earth. Today, scientists working on AI think the chance their work puts an end to humanity is vastly higher than that.

In response, some have suggested we launch a Manhattan Project to make AI safe via enormous investment in relevant R&D. Others have suggested that we need international organisations modelled on those that slowed the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Others still seek a research slowdown by labs while an auditing and licencing scheme is created.

Today’s guest — journalist Ezra Klein of The New York Times — has watched policy discussions and legislative battles play out in DC for 20 years. Like many people he has also taken a big interest in AI this year, writing articles such as “This changes everything.” In his first interview on the show in 2021, he flagged AI as one topic that DC would regret not having paid more attention to.

So we invited him on to get his take on which regulatory proposals have promise, and which seem either unhelpful or politically unviable.

Out of the ideas on the table right now, Ezra favours a focus on direct government funding — both for AI safety research and to develop AI models designed to solve problems other than making money for their operators. He is sympathetic to legislation that would require AI models to be legible in a way that none currently are — and embraces the fact that that will slow down the release of models while businesses figure out how their products actually work.

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