I can think of a few other areas of direct impact which could particularly benefit from talented software engineers:
Improving climate models is a potential route for high impact on climate change, there are computational modelling initiatives such as the Climate Modeling Alliance and startups such as Cervest. It would also be valuable to contribute to open source computational tools such as the Julia programming language and certain Python libraries etc.
There is also the area of computer simulations for organisational / government decision making, such as Improbable Defence (disclosure: I am a former employee and current shareholder), Simudyne and Hash.ai. I’ve heard anecdotally that a few employees of Hash.ai are sympathetic to EA, but I don’t have first hand evidence of this.
More broadly there are many areas of academic research, not just AI safety, which could benefit from more research software engineers. The Society of Research Software Engineering aims to provide a community for research engineers and to make this a more established career path. This type of work in academia tends to pay significantly lower than private sector software salaries, so this is worse for ETG, but on the flip side this is an argument for it being a relatively neglected opportunity.
I can think of a few other areas of direct impact which could particularly benefit from talented software engineers:
Improving climate models is a potential route for high impact on climate change, there are computational modelling initiatives such as the Climate Modeling Alliance and startups such as Cervest. It would also be valuable to contribute to open source computational tools such as the Julia programming language and certain Python libraries etc.
There is also the area of computer simulations for organisational / government decision making, such as Improbable Defence (disclosure: I am a former employee and current shareholder), Simudyne and Hash.ai. I’ve heard anecdotally that a few employees of Hash.ai are sympathetic to EA, but I don’t have first hand evidence of this.
More broadly there are many areas of academic research, not just AI safety, which could benefit from more research software engineers. The Society of Research Software Engineering aims to provide a community for research engineers and to make this a more established career path. This type of work in academia tends to pay significantly lower than private sector software salaries, so this is worse for ETG, but on the flip side this is an argument for it being a relatively neglected opportunity.