Benjamin Todd

speaker

4,140 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2023 last heard 28 May

Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #244 – Benjamin Todd on how we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history · 26 May 2026 podcast

I do still think misalignment risks and AI loss of control risks are probably like the risk I would say is most important and neglected, but there's now a lot of other things.

So something like concentration of power, that's a much more like social sciency in a way, geopolitical elements type cause.

which needs a lot of non-technical people working on it.

There's also still pandemic risks, engineered pandemic risks, and that actually mainly requires almost kind of like company building and engineering type skills.

But, you know, there's a lot we could do to really make the world a lot safer from pandemics.

which would just be good in general, but also the risks could be accelerated if technological progress speeds up.

And then I also in the book briefly talk about this range of emerging challenges, which are also super diverse from like,

the philosophical questions of like, what do we do about AI sentience and like legal questions around that to even things like space governance, gradual disempowerment, which is again, more of a like a social structure type challenge rather than a technical challenge.

Yeah, I mean, I would also say even if you just want to, if you want to focus on global health, you should probably be thinking a lot about how you could use AI to help with that or how AI might affect various aspects of it.

So yeah, there's like a much broader range of issues.

And then there's also a very broad range of roles these days.

And yeah, I mean, more technical researchers would still be great, but we've done these surveys asking organizations we think are impactful, what are their biggest talent bottlenecks?

And a lot of them are saying operations staff.

So just like people to do management and HR and accounting and like finding offices and hiring people and all of the things you need to do to run an organization.

And so...

anyone who's just worked in like business or pretty much any other fields might have those skills.

Another huge bottleneck is communications.

So spreading the word about these problems, doing like PR and media for these different companies.

There's a lot of or even just being like an individual writer talking about these things.

And then also just like huge need for people still in policy and government

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