Co-founder of High Impact Engineers. Background in materials science and mechanical engineering. Also chat to me about community building, career decisions, etc.
Jessica Wen
Karma: 803
Thank you Marie! Wishing you all the best with High Impact Medicine <3
Apologies, only just saw this! Computer hardware engineering definitely seems like a very worthwhile and impactful career choice. Some resources on becoming a computer hardware engineer:
- What does it mean to become an expert in AI hardware? – EA Forum
- Lennart Heim’s resources (he used to be a computer engineer and now works at RAND. HI-Eng also interviewed him in our podcast, where we discussed his career trajectory)
- Onni Aarne’s writeup on advice and resources for getting into compute governance
Hope these are useful! Feel free to book a career conversation with us to chat more about your career plans and we can go further in depth :)
Thanks for your comment Ulrik! Some thoughts on your bullet points:
- I think there probably are opportunities to do biosecurity work in LMICs (e.g. Africa CDC’s Biosafety and Biosecurity initiative, the Southeast Asia Strategic Multilateral Dialogue on Biosecurity) but these seem mostly policy-based rather than focused on technical interventions (likely because there’s just more private and public money for developing technical interventions in high-income countries).
- 80k mentioned that they would be adding more technical governance jobs (i.e., more roles in semiconductors/chips) in the near future, so hopefully the geographical bias might shift somewhat. However, my intuition is that the US will continue to be a hotspot for jobs in this sector because of the sheer size and concentration of semiconductor companies (and maybe because of the higher likelihood of actually affecting governance/regulations/standards?)
- We did some mapping of engineering disciplines to cause areas, which you can see here and on our Resource Portal (it is by no means comprehensive – we even miss out nuclear!) Turns out mechanical engineers are pretty useful in a lot of cause areas. Hope that’s helpful!
Thanks for this interesting series! I’ve also been subscribed to The Global Prosperity Institute’s newsletter, which releases interesting analyses of different approaches/policies to increase growth. At least one of the founders is a long-time EA, and the analyses are interesting to read!
As much as I love the summaries from the summary bot, I think this one missed the mark. The reason why we talk with people 1 to 1 about whether they should do a PhD is because there is so much nuance and variation depending on personal fit, career goals, industry circumstances, impact goals, etc. This summary does a bad job at conveying these nuances.
For example, point 2 mentions that doing a PhD limits finances, which is a short-sighted way of putting it, especially considering that over a lifetime, PhDs make back the earnings that they lose over the time that they are doing a PhD, and jobs requiring a PhD are often much more highly paid.
Point 3 feels pretty blanket-statement-y about scaring away employers when really there is only a minority of employers who are scared away (they probably won’t be if you’re willing to take the pay that they’re offering).
Point 6 also feels too strongly worded – I don’t think you can ever know if there are no better impact opportunities. Also, not everyone wants to go into entrepreneurship so this last consideration wouldn’t apply.
I know this summary is AI-generated but I think a more nuanced and less strongly worded summary could be created.
Thank you for your positive feedback! I am not aware of a particular directory of these experts, but I’d be happy to connect you to our contacts working on reducing nuclear risks.
Thanks for linking to HI-Eng! We do in fact recommend HVAC as an impactful career for people who want to work on Indoor Air Quality to slow pandemic spread. It’s great to hear about the experience of an actual HVAC engineer!
I think it’s commendable that you shop at charity shops and donate proceeds from selling items, and that you’re thinking about their effectiveness. I think these charities that run shops in the UK are unlikely to rank highly on cost-effectiveness because they probably score quite low on the Neglectedness aspect (they’re recognisable brands, which means that more people are likely to know them and therefore donate to them), and a lot of these charities do local community work (and therefore tends to be less cost-effective than funding charity work overseas).
My approach when I buy clothes and other stuff from charity shops is mostly to reduce the harm from buying this stuff new rather than to contribute to a specific charity. Interested in your thoughts!
As someone who studied materials science, I enjoyed this post and appreciated the effort you spent on making technical work legible for laypeople.
As a general comment, I would like to see a technical/mechanistic breakdown of other threat models for how AI could cause doom very soon – I would be surprised if this was the only example of a theoretical threat that is practically very unlikely/bottlenecked due to engineering reasons.
Congratulations George! After my recent visit to China (my first since I went vegan) I was truly blown away by how convincing a lot of the tofu meat substitutes are. Even my meat-eating brother was surprised. I’m glad that you’re trying to bring this to Western audiences!
I will note that the UK e-book is not free, but I coughed up the £1.63 for it anyway ;)Perhaps this isn’t the place to discuss this, but despite the excellent fake meats in China, they really haven’t taken off and meat consumption and production are at an all-time high. How much better do meat substitutes have to be for people to choose them over animal meat?
This is fantastic news!
I was planning on writing something similar for my experience as a co-founder of High Impact Engineers, but your post covers a lot of my thoughts and experience. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Joshua,
Thanks for the information and the link to the report! Glad to hear that they are a part of the EA extended universe :)
I haven’t heard anyone talk about the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) – it seems that their programmes/focus areas overlap with a few of EA’s cause areas:
Weapons of Mass Destruction: mainly nuclear non-proliferation, also biological and chemical weapons
Security and Technology: AI, cybersecurity, and even brain-computer interfaces (mainly around how these interface with weapons systems)
Space Security: space governance and norms
Global Peace: especially around managing exits from armed conflict and building the Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone
even Gender and Disarmament to tackle violence against women and girls
I was particularly impressed by their AI Policy Portal, which tracks each country’s approach to governance frameworks, practices, and cooperation.
Unfortunately, like most UN institutes, their fellowships and programmes tend to be unpaid. Could be worth applying to some if you can afford it, for the experience and connections!
Thanks for the clarification!
These look like some interesting project ideas! Could you elaborate on why Reslab won’t be prototyping any of these ideas? (Feel free to say that you’d rather not say as well!)
Thanks Allison!
Doing some BOTECs and looking for the total number of attendees at EAG SF 2022, EAG DC 2022, EAGxVirtual 2022, and EAG London 2023. Does anyone happen to have these numbers?
Thanks for sharing these data. The y-axes aren’t shown so it’s difficult to compare these plots, but I think it’s interesting that the distribution of community satisfaction for Black or African American people in the EA community seems to stand out in comparison to other groups.
The small sample size definitely makes drawing conclusions difficult (maybe apart from showing that EA skews very white for a movement focused on big global issues!)
Thank you Karla!