I’m a Taiwanese and it seems it’s difficult to immigrate to the USA nowadays, as the demand of CS enigneers are decreasing rapidly. I’m in fact considering I should persue medical school, and go apply for resident doctor in the USA, it has higher success probabilty than immigrating as a CS engineer. But I’m not sure if it’s worth 5 years additional of working on medicine in order to secure my Permanent residency in the USA.
However, it seems it’s difficult to make impact to reducing AI risks outside of the USA/UK. All of the frontier AI companies and EA organzations(like CLR, MIRI) are mostly in the USA(or the UK), and it’s hard to get a remote job opportunity. Therefore, there’s a case that even if I have to work 5 years more on irrelevant stuff, it’s still worth it. Since maybe getting the residency in the USA can make your impact multipy by 3x, even 10x, but I’m unsure and I’m open for any critique. How do you think?
I think location constraints (either visa or personal) should be an important factor for career choice. 80k recommends moving to a hub in general, but I think the importance varies across career paths. As a starting point, I’d try to factor such constraints into my exploration priority list. I.e., if I’m roughly equally excited about two paths overall and one fits my location constraints much better, then explore that path first.
I would definitely advise against doing a medical degree, just to then become an engineer in the US. I think it’s not realistic to keep your motivation level sufficiently high.
Frontier companies are highly competitive; they can afford not to bother with remote working. For EA/AIS, I think most entry roles are similarly highly competitive, and for some roles, it’s simply mandatory to be close to Tech/Policy hubs. But there are also some remote-first organizations, mostly ones that require scarce experienced profiles.
I think it’s important to distinguish between the following two theories of change categories:
Doing important work that not enough people want to do
Doing important work differently from how others would do it
For #1, if the nature of the work itself does not require in-person presence, and there are no remote options, then maybe the current supply/demand gap is not as big as you originally thought, so the expected counterfactual impact might also be much lower. For #2, there is no such gap by definition, and filtering applicants for in-person presence is very likely.
Thanks for your answeing. I think there’s another category for your theory of change: 3.Doing important work that not enough people “can” do it well. And that’s more similar to 1. Another way to put it, how much $ do you think would it be worth for me to pay for a USA green card, if it can be bought?