The question of whether to enhance capabilities indirectly — for example, by taking a front end web development job at Capabilities AI Company, or building tooling for their researchers — seems a lot simpler than the question of whether to work on capabilities-flavoured research yourself. Because you lose most of the benefits of capabilities research (which fall out from having expertise in the research itself), but keep all the downsides of reducing the time available for alignment research.
Right?
In which case there’s a coherent viewpoint whereby we should generally try to dissuade people from taking most jobs at Capabilities AI Company, while actively steering trustworthy people into their research positions.
I highlight this because I don’t want anyone to make the mistake of bucketing the two together. For example, if 80,000 Hours ends up deciding on a ‘house policy’ formulated as “continue to list capabilities roles on our jobs board”, they could do a lot better by remembering to exclude the indirect kind of job. (I remember seeing such a job on there before—a software role at an AI capabilities org that was not direct research.)
The question of whether to enhance capabilities indirectly — for example, by taking a front end web development job at Capabilities AI Company, or building tooling for their researchers — seems a lot simpler than the question of whether to work on capabilities-flavoured research yourself. Because you lose most of the benefits of capabilities research (which fall out from having expertise in the research itself), but keep all the downsides of reducing the time available for alignment research.
Right?
In which case there’s a coherent viewpoint whereby we should generally try to dissuade people from taking most jobs at Capabilities AI Company, while actively steering trustworthy people into their research positions.
I highlight this because I don’t want anyone to make the mistake of bucketing the two together. For example, if 80,000 Hours ends up deciding on a ‘house policy’ formulated as “continue to list capabilities roles on our jobs board”, they could do a lot better by remembering to exclude the indirect kind of job. (I remember seeing such a job on there before—a software role at an AI capabilities org that was not direct research.)
(What am I missing?)