Where do you point newcomers who want to get involved in AI safety?
By Rasool @ 2026-09-07T13:37 (+9)
People who are totally unconnected to the EA/LessWrong/Rationalist/AI safety scene are increasingly asking me how they can pivot their career to help AI go well.
Is there a canonical entry point to share with people? There's aisafety.com's list of training programs, or 80,000 hours' career advising calls/AI chat, or Bluedot's courses; are there any others that people recommend?
Jen baik @ 2026-09-08T05:37 (+2)
Hm.. i think the whole problem with sending links is that there's way too much capital C crap everywhere - links galore. Coaching programs exist largely to help people weed out whats relevant & personalized to them (could this be a scalable product? hm)
My post-event emails as a reference: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EhLhrrEEG6Jo9kYJv/learnings-from-a-viral-linkedin-post-what-ai-safety-means-to
- I can tell you that MOST people did not click the links I shared in my linkedin post. alas psychological phenomenon of link overload and lack of activation energy to put eyeballs to read a page.
Mick @ 2026-09-08T08:43 (+1)
Having also done coaching, I do just frequently share the same links with most people I talk with. It does seem to help a little bit when you say to their face "this is a great resource" though, and even better if you can specifically justify to someone why this is a good resource for someone in their position.
I'm curious how well Stampy, 80ks AI advisor or Lens Academy's coach do at this.
Louee @ 2026-09-08T12:58 (+1)
BlueDot Impact and the 80,000 Hours AI safety courses are usually the safest bets to drop first since they actually give people a structured way in without feeling too overwhelming. If they're completely fresh to the scene, pointing them toward AI Safety Fundamentals or getting them to sign up for an 80k Hours chat usually stops them from spinning their wheels trying to read every single LessWrong post ever written.
Mick @ 2026-09-08T08:40 (+1)
In my experience, you run into these problems when you try to do this:
- not being specific enough
- Being so specific the page becomes very long 3. Or, you have to put a lot of effort filtering for people what they should pay attention to (which depends on seniority, previous career, how bought into AI risk they are, what roles they're interested in, restrictions in careers such as location, family, etc) that it becomes unwieldy
- A lot of these resources being reading, which selects for certain kinds of people
- Having to review a lot of different resources to find the best ones, among different kind of media .
- The field moving so fast you have to keep this up to date, meaning you have to stay on top of current resources.
For reference, here's the bare bones version we came up with for AI Safety Quest: https://aisafety.quest/#calls where we explicitly went for "short list of stable resources that are introductory, but require effort from the reader to go in depth".