Hi ben
I don’t see public engagement as a bottleneck to AI Safety. If at all, it may help in getting the urgency it needs. Secondly, there are so many narratives and all of us are overwhelmed in terms of what to believe or who to believe.
If a voice/ org/ platform with credibility can lead in educating public, i believe it will be incredibly helpful.
Building on this — there’s a version of this gap that makes it more urgent. A recurring theme in recent funding discussions under the banner- 3rd Wave of american Philanthropy is that Philanthropic money will outpace the field’s absorptive capacity: not enough well-run orgs to deploy it. If that’s the real bottleneck, then the constraint is institutional capacity — exactly what experienced generalist operators build. Screening them out for lacking an AI research background works against the field’s own stated need.
I’m living this: 12+ years building orgs from scratch (entity, compliance, governance, systems), repeatedly screened out at CV stage for “no prior AI safety background” — for roles that are fundamentally about building infrastructure, not research.
One idea: separate “context” from “competence” in hiring. Operational competence is portable; AI-safety context is learnable in weeks. Screen for the first, onboard the second — rather than using “prior experience” as a proxy that filters out the builders the field says it needs.
Curious whether others see this as tractable — or whether the current screens are more rational than they look from the candidate side.