I agree that EA community building could be a good option for some subset of people who want to ensure that AI goes well.
There are some people who are well-positioned to do EA community building, but lack the skills to contribute towards AI governance or technical community building. Actually, I would go further and say that a much broader set of people would be suited for EA community building rather than anything AI safety specific.
That said, there are some other options you should consider too. If AI safety is what you care about and you don’t have sufficient AI safety or governance knowledge to work on it directly, you may want to consider doing either x-risk or longtermist community building to narrow the focus. On the other hand, it’s also very important to consider the interests of those in your area.
Additionally, you may also want to consider if you could have a greater impact by volunteering to provide ops support to someone working on AI safety movement building. That said, this requires you to be highly motivated and reliable—something is much harder than it seems—otherwise your impact might be minimal.
Being a highly motivated, reliable, and intelligent volunteer seems pretty underestimated as potential impact. With taking a salary position, your impact is something close to your superiority to the other person who might have your position. It’s easy to imagine competent employees having a negative counterfactual impact due to displacing someone better.
On the other hand, if you are a reliable, motivated, intelligent volunteer, you are simply providing excellent resources. Volunteering for promising projects that fall in the funding cracks could be quite EV for those without financial means to help important projects.
But I would not recommend such volunteering unless you are serious… It’s very easy to have negative value to an organization as a volunteer if you take from the time and resources from an organization and leaving shortly after, or stick around without actually doing much to help.
I agree that EA community building could be a good option for some subset of people who want to ensure that AI goes well.
There are some people who are well-positioned to do EA community building, but lack the skills to contribute towards AI governance or technical community building. Actually, I would go further and say that a much broader set of people would be suited for EA community building rather than anything AI safety specific.
That said, there are some other options you should consider too. If AI safety is what you care about and you don’t have sufficient AI safety or governance knowledge to work on it directly, you may want to consider doing either x-risk or longtermist community building to narrow the focus. On the other hand, it’s also very important to consider the interests of those in your area.
Additionally, you may also want to consider if you could have a greater impact by volunteering to provide ops support to someone working on AI safety movement building. That said, this requires you to be highly motivated and reliable—something is much harder than it seems—otherwise your impact might be minimal.
Being a highly motivated, reliable, and intelligent volunteer seems pretty underestimated as potential impact. With taking a salary position, your impact is something close to your superiority to the other person who might have your position. It’s easy to imagine competent employees having a negative counterfactual impact due to displacing someone better.
On the other hand, if you are a reliable, motivated, intelligent volunteer, you are simply providing excellent resources. Volunteering for promising projects that fall in the funding cracks could be quite EV for those without financial means to help important projects.
But I would not recommend such volunteering unless you are serious… It’s very easy to have negative value to an organization as a volunteer if you take from the time and resources from an organization and leaving shortly after, or stick around without actually doing much to help.