You wrote that governance is more important than technical research. Have you considered technical work that supports governance? The AI Safety Fundamentals course has a week on this.
In any case, working in AI or AI safety would increase your credibility for any activism that you decide to engage in.
Con: Programming will be automated before my other career path choices.
Are you confident about this claim?
Thanks for your responses, they are very insightful.
As AI operations scale up, it feels like AI/ML engineers will become more valuable and mid-sized SWE jobs will be swallowed by LLMs and those building them.
I'm very curious about your opinion on this.
Con: Not as exciting as doing something in AI or AI safety
There's a lot of software engineering work around AI. https://x.com/gdb/status/1729893902814192096
This is something I have not considered, thank you.
I assume that ML skills are less in-supply however?
I feel like all my career path choices are not as good as I want them to be: (Software Engineer, AI researcher, AI alignment researcher, all-in with PauseAI)
I am 19 and a second-year university student studying computer science. I am very bought-into AI X/S-Risk and I want to help prevent these risks somehow.
Path 1: Software Engineer:
I will have a bachelors in 2026 and I can start earning to give towards X-risk orgs.
Path 2: AI researcher: Work at top-AI lab likely doing capabilities research
Path 3: AI-Alignment researcher for AI-lab or non-profit
Path 4: All-in with PauseAI and do grunt work outreach
Path 5: Other
An other option: try to get a SWE internship now. Then, depending on how it goes, you might want to consider dropping out.
Some of my best swe colleagues dropped out because they had full-time jobs. It probably accelerated their career by 1 or 2 years.
I'm currently sitting at a desk at a SWE unpaid internship LOL.
I don't think I currently have the skills to start getting paid for SWE work sadly.
Nice!
Gotcha. Probably combining your studies with internships is the best option for now.