Benjamin Todd

One trade-off you might face is between the following two types of career capital.

Transferable career capital is relevant in lots of different options.

For example, social skills, productivity and management skills, which are needed by almost every organisation, or achievements that are widely recognised as impressive.

Specialist career capital prepares you for a narrow range of paths, like knowledge of malaria or information security.

Which should you focus on?

All else equal, when you're earlier in your career, you should focus more on transferable career capital.

At the start of your career, you're more uncertain about what's best, so it's more useful to have flexibility.

And more generally, the more uncertain you are about what roles you want in the longer term, the more you should focus on transferable career capital.

Unfortunately, however, all else is often not equal.

While specialist career capital gives you fewer options, it's often necessary to enter the most impactful jobs, so it's still probably worth focusing on at some point.

Should you wait to have an impact?

If you could work as an AI safety engineer today, should you still do a PhD to try to open up potential research positions you think might be higher impact?

If you do the PhD, not only do you give up the impact you would have had early on, you're also delaying your impact further into the future.

Most researchers on this topic agree that, all else being equal, it's better to put resources towards fixing the world's most pressing problems sooner rather than later.

For instance, once transformative AI systems have been built, your work might be too late.

Moreover, in the meantime, there's a risk you could give up on trying to have an impact, and informal polls suggest the annual risk of this might be quite high.

This means the boost in career capital you gain from doing a PhD needs to be substantially more than the career capital you'd gain as someone working directly on AI safety, say a software engineer in a safety team, to be worth those costs.

But often it is worth it.

It's not out of the question that you could have twice as much impact as a researcher than a software engineer.

And as we saw above, it's plausible that some people become 10 times more productive over their career by gaining particularly good career capital.