(Off the cuff answer including some random guesses and estimates I won’t stand behind, focused on the kind of theoretical alignment work I’m spending most of my days thinking about right now.)
Over the long run I would guess that alignment is broadly similar to other research areas, where a large/healthy field could support lots of work from lots of people, where some kinds of contributions are very heavy-tailed but there is a lot of complementarity and many researchers are having large overall marginal impacts.
Right now I think difficulties (at least for growing the kind of alignment work I’m most excited about) are mostly related to trying to expand quickly, greatly exacerbated by not having a good idea what’s going on / what we should be trying to do, and not having a straightforward motivating methodology/test case since you are trying to do things in advance motivated by altruistic impact. I’m still optimistic that we will be able to scale up reasonably quickly such that many more people are helpfully engaged in the future and eventually these difficulties will be resolved.
In the very short term, while other bottlenecks are severe, I think it’s mostly a question of how to use complementary resources (like mentorship and discussion) rather than “who could do useful work in an absolute sense.” My vague guess is that in the short term the bar will be kind of quantitatively similar to “would get a tenure-track role at a top university” though obviously our evaluations of the bar will be highly noisy and we are selecting on different properties and at an earlier career stage.
I think it’s much easier for lots of people to work more independently and take swings at the problem and that this could also be quite valuable (though there are lots of valuable things to do). Unfortunately I think that’s a somewhat harder task and there are fewer people who will have a good time doing it. But at least the hard parts depend on a somewhat different set of skills (e.g. more loaded on initiative and entrepreneurial spirit and being able to figure things out on your own) so may cover some people who wouldn’t make sense as early hires, and also there may be a lot of people who would be great hires but where it’s too hard to tell from an application process.
(Off the cuff answer including some random guesses and estimates I won’t stand behind, focused on the kind of theoretical alignment work I’m spending most of my days thinking about right now.)
Over the long run I would guess that alignment is broadly similar to other research areas, where a large/healthy field could support lots of work from lots of people, where some kinds of contributions are very heavy-tailed but there is a lot of complementarity and many researchers are having large overall marginal impacts.
Right now I think difficulties (at least for growing the kind of alignment work I’m most excited about) are mostly related to trying to expand quickly, greatly exacerbated by not having a good idea what’s going on / what we should be trying to do, and not having a straightforward motivating methodology/test case since you are trying to do things in advance motivated by altruistic impact. I’m still optimistic that we will be able to scale up reasonably quickly such that many more people are helpfully engaged in the future and eventually these difficulties will be resolved.
In the very short term, while other bottlenecks are severe, I think it’s mostly a question of how to use complementary resources (like mentorship and discussion) rather than “who could do useful work in an absolute sense.” My vague guess is that in the short term the bar will be kind of quantitatively similar to “would get a tenure-track role at a top university” though obviously our evaluations of the bar will be highly noisy and we are selecting on different properties and at an earlier career stage.
I think it’s much easier for lots of people to work more independently and take swings at the problem and that this could also be quite valuable (though there are lots of valuable things to do). Unfortunately I think that’s a somewhat harder task and there are fewer people who will have a good time doing it. But at least the hard parts depend on a somewhat different set of skills (e.g. more loaded on initiative and entrepreneurial spirit and being able to figure things out on your own) so may cover some people who wouldn’t make sense as early hires, and also there may be a lot of people who would be great hires but where it’s too hard to tell from an application process.
Hey Paul, thanks for taking the time to write that up, that’s very helpful!