Suggestions for getting retiree / second career folks interested in AI Safety?
I know someone who recently retired and is interested in taking on an intellectually engaging part-time project. He is quite gifted both analytically and in terms of people skills and business acumen. (He has the horsepower to do quantitative work, having pursued a PhD in Electrical Engineering many years ago, but is probably pretty rusty, as his career did not require intensive mathematical work or computer science for the last 20-30 years.)
I think he would find it interesting and worthwhile to contribute to AI safety work, but I’m looking for things I can share with him to:
Pique/assess his interest in the field. (I would say he’s somewhat curious, but not at all actively bought into the importance of AI safety as a place for him to devote his time and energy).
Provide opportunities for him to get involved.
Any suggestions? A friend suggested:
I’d recommend reading some blog posts on 80k/alignment forum/less wrong to test interest and then taking the bluedot impact AI safety fundamentals course
https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/ is probably the best starting place if he’s not yet convinced that it’s an important problem to work on.
There are a variety of organizations that hire for remote roles, and from your brief description of “analytically and in terms of people skills and business acumen” this person might be capable of a variety of things: operations, technical, strategy, people management, etc. My off-the-cuff recommendations for some options would be:
Check the job boards once a week, and keep an eye out for part-time roles, full-time roles that might be flexible, or anything else that might work. 80,000 Hours job board and Probably Good Job Board are both good, but EA NYC’s Job board is also good.
Email a few people at a few different organizations to ask if he can volunteer, intern, or do some modestly paid work.
participate in and then be a coordinator for the virtual programs.
Join Blue Dot’s AI safety courses.
offer mentorship, coaching, etc.
This is all assuming that he has some understanding of the content and the context that is relevant. If he isn’t familiar with some basic ideas relating to AI safety (or to more broad EA-type ideas, like impact, expected value, utilitarian ethics, etc.) then doing some reading about that kind of stuff might be the first step.