I’m an electrical engineering undergraduate. I’d be especially excited to work on making it easier for AI chips to track what they are being used for, and making it harder for bad actors to remove this feature. The more we can achieve this, the more governments will be able to reduce the risk of misaligned AI by regulating compute.
Once I’ve built up about 24 months worth of living expenses in savings, I plan to take a Giving What We Can Further Pledge to live on maybe $25,000 per year (to be adjusted for inflation and reevaluated if I have a child) so I can donate most of my income to GiveWell recommended charities. I currently donate to the GiveWell All Grants Fund and offset my carbon footprint by donating to the Founder’s Pledge Climate Change Fund.
I’ve been thinking about your perspective lately, and wondered if there is a variable I hadn’t considered enough. I was raised middle class American and my dad was raised upper middle class American. For this post, I drew on my decade of experience as a lower class American after a disability left me unable to earn a good living for a long time. My field was heavily male dominated (construction). Since in my experience lower class American norms seem more gendered to me, I would expect the experience of someone who hasn’t worked in a male-dominated lower class American field to be pretty different from mine. My friends were ones I made from work, so they already considered me one of the guys. Do you think your experience was different from mine because you didn’t work in a male-dominated field?
I also suspect I gave off a one-of-the-guys vibe (because that’s the environment I prefer) that you don’t that altered how people treated me. I found this Slate Star Codex post helpful in thinking about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/