The Two-Track Workforce: Automating High-Impact Roles Faster

By tonglu @ 2025-06-27T23:08 (–1)

Proposal: For critical EA-aligned jobs (e.g., AI safety research, policy advocacy, biosecurity), every position should have:

1. A Primary Worker – Executing the role.
2. An Automation Team – Dedicated to making the role obsolete via tools/AI.

Why This Could Work for EA:

• Focus on Scalability – Automating high-impact roles frees up talent for harder problems.
• Prioritization – Start with bottleneck areas (e.g., grantmaking, literature reviews).
• Resilience – If the primary worker leaves, automation fills gaps faster.

Challenges & Open Questions:

• Incentives – Would workers resist automating their own jobs? Could impact-weighted salaries help?
• Feasibility – Which EA orgs could pilot this (e.g., ops-heavy charities like GiveWell)?
• Risks – Premature automation might reduce quality (e.g., in research).