Your Biggest Lever: Designing your AI Career for Maximum Impact, with 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Ben Todd, co-founder of the non-profit career strategy organization, 80,000 Hours, and author of the book by the same name, which, 10 years after its first edition, is being re-released today, May 26th, fully rewritten for the modern AI moment.
Looking back on the last decade, I think you'd have a hard time finding a source of information that would have better prepared you for the present day situation than 80,000 Hours. Their emphasis on pandemic preparedness predated by years and was tragically validated by the COVID experience. They were well ahead of the curve in recognizing the importance of AI and encouraging people to work on AI safety projects. Their podcast and blog have been a consistently excellent source of fresh perspectives on cutting-edge ideas. And their free one-on-one career advisory service was useful to me personally, as I made the jump from entrepreneur to full-time student of AI roughly four years ago.
With that in mind, today's conversation is an overview of Ben's latest thinking on how you, yes you, can apply your skills to improve the chances that AI really does end up benefiting all humanity. We begin with Ben's thoughts on AI timelines, a question that he cleverly reframes, encouraging people to ask not when exactly AGI or superintelligence will arrive, but when, under varying assumptions, your own personal impact will peak. Ben argues that under all but the most extreme short timeline views, there is still time to invest in positioning yourself for maximum impact.
From there, we turn to the top problems that Ben and the 80,000 Hours team see in the world today, that we might lose control of AI systems, that AI could concentrate power in unprecedented and deeply problematic ways, and that we're still not well prepared for the next pandemic. We get Ben's perspective on arguments for and against AI safety-focused people going to work at frontier AI companies, including his thoughts on the critical discipline of continually questioning one's own motives and the importance of peer effects. We discuss different lines of work, including technical research, policymaking and advising, communications and organization building, all of which Ben believes have an important role to play. We assess the funding environment with the encouraging conclusion that there is currently plenty of funding available to support ambitious projects. We analyze whether it makes more sense to join an existing organization that's working to scale or start a new one from scratch. And we get Ben's take on what new ideas, including concerns around AI welfare, gradual disempowerment, and space governance, are potentially undervalued today.
To be clear, this conversation is not a substitute for the book, which contains a lot more practical advice than we were able to cover today. But I hope it serves to inspire you to think bigger and more pro-socially about your own career and to alert you to the outsized impact that your personal contribution can still have on the shape of the AI future. With that, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Ben Todd, co-founder and author of 80,000 Hours. Ben Todd, founder of 80,000 Hours and author of the new book by the same name, 80,000 Hours, coming out in the United States on May 26th. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Benjamin Todd** (3:22)
Thanks so much for having me. I'm a long-time listener.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:25)
That's very kind. I've certainly followed your work for a long time as well.
So premise of today's conversation is AI is going to be a big deal. The decisions that get made around exactly how to shape it, how to deploy it, how to govern it over the next few years, could have a really outsized impact on the future for a long time to come.
I want to get into that and get your take on how people who maybe don't work directly in the space yet or who do a kind of work but are not sure if they're making the biggest impact that they can, how they might think about pivoting their careers to try to make the most positive contribution that they can. But maybe before we get into that, I'd love to just set the stage with what's the backstory behind 80,000 Hours? What's the story of the name? What are the principles that you guys use as you think about how to advise people and how to think about their careers? With that table set, then we'll dive into the AI moment that we're in.

**Benjamin Todd** (4:26)
Cool. Yeah. The name 80,000 Hours is taken from the typical length of a career, so 2,000 hours a year for 40 years.
The idea is that's the biggest decision you'll ever make from the perspective of your personal life, but even more so from the perspective of your impact on the world, that's the biggest lever you have to pull.