The Bar for Contributing to AI Safety is Lower than You Think

By Chris Leong @ 2024-08-17T10:52 (+14)

Many people still have a model of AI safety where they assume that the bar for contributing must be really high.

I'm here to tell you that this isn't the case.

The Value of Good Community Members

Even without conducting groundbreaking research, "good community members" play a crucial role in expanding and enriching the AI Safety space. But what constitutes a good community member?

While possessing a high degree of intelligence is undeniably beneficial, other personal attributes that can compensate for raw intelligence to a certain extent. These include:

• Intellectual humility
• The ability to deeply understand other perspectives
• Dedication to continuous learning more about the field

There is undoubtedly some level of baseline intelligence below which it'll be hard for you to be a net contributor, but that's not as much of an issue as you might think as most members of the EA community are quite smart anyway. The proliferation of accessible resources on AI and AI Safety has substantially lowered the barrier to entry for being able to usefully contribute to discussions and if you have a genuine interest, learning about the field won't really feel like work.

Soft Skills

Other attributes can significantly increase your value as a community member.

• Good vibes is a major value add. No one wants to be around a jerk
• Being able to read the room. Knowing when to speak and when to listen. Try not to be the guy who has absolutely no clue, but takes up a disproportionate amount of air time
• When you're listening to people, truly listening. People love spending time around people who do this
• If you're good at providing feedback, you'll find high demand as it's hard to see all angles of a problem by yourself. The rapid growth of the field has created a mentorship bottleneck, making peer support increasingly vital
• Providing emotional support. AI Safety can be quite confronting at times, but we can help each other work through this

Conclusion

The field of AI Safety benefits not only from groundbreaking research but also from a vibrant, supportive community of engaged individuals. By participating actively, providing feedback, and maintaining an open and curious mindset, you may contribute more significantly than you initially believed possible. There are many attributes that can make you a valuable community member other than raw intelligence and these attributes can be developed if you're willing to work on it.

And who knows? Maybe even if you don't feel like you have that much to offer, but you consistently read things, hang around the community read things and provide feedback on other people's ideas, you might eventually be drawn towards pursuing an idea of your own.

(I don’t wish to imply that I have all of these attributes myself, so I expect writing this list to end up being useful for me too).