AI for societal decision making - How promising is the space? 80,000 Hours profile
By Zershaaneh Qureshi, 80000_Hours @ 2026-02-20T13:28 (+51)
Hi everyone, Zershaaneh here!
80,000 Hours has published an article on using AI to improve societal decision making.
This post includes some context, the summary from the article, and the table of contents with links to each section.
Context
This is meant to be a medium-depth, introductory resource for understanding how AI tools could be used to enhance societal decision making — and why speeding up their development and adoption could make a huge difference to how the future unfolds.
It covers:
- The kinds of tools we think are especially promising, and the opportunity we might have to differentially speed up their development and adoption.
- The possible pitfalls of trying to advance AI decision making tools — like the chance the tools you work on would have already been built by default, and the risk of inadvertently speeding up more dangerous AI capabilities.
- Our all-things-considered take on how much we recommend working in this area — and what sort of person would be a good fit. (Right now, we’d be excited to see hundreds more people taking this path, but we don’t think it’s a good option for everyone.)
- Lots of options for getting involved — including roles that don’t require a technical background, and ways to position yourself to help out in future if you’re not in a good position to change your career right now.
Why are we posting this here?
We really want people to:
- Know that this resource exists — an article spelling out both the promise and the challenges of working in this area, and the different ways you could try to contribute.
- Share the article with anyone who might be interested in a career in this direction.
- Tell us what they think through this anonymous survey. It’s especially useful for us to know if there’s anything that seems wrong or misleading.
Summary (from the article)
The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade”, forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen before — and with less time to get them right.
But AI development also presents an opportunity: we could build and deploy AI tools that help us think more clearly, act more wisely, and coordinate more effectively. And if we roll these decision-making tools out quickly enough, humanity could be far better equipped to navigate the critical period ahead.
We’d be excited to see some more people trying to speed up the development and adoption of these tools. We think that for the right person, this path could be very impactful.
That said, this is not a mature area. There’s significant uncertainty about what work will actually be most useful, and getting involved has potential downside risks.
So our guess is that, at this stage, it’d be great if something like a few hundred particularly thoughtful and entrepreneurial people worked on using AI to improve societal decision making. If the field proves promising, they could pave the way for more people to get involved later.
Overall view – Sometimes recommended.
We’d love to see more people working on this issue. But you might be able to do even more good working on one of our top priority problem areas.