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 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

And it's very possible to get into these types of roles in just a couple of months, even if you don't have an AI background already.

I mean, one other big message of the book is people really think, well, I'm interested in these things and so I need to find a career involving them, otherwise I won't be satisfied.

But we've seen so many examples of people just trying anyway and then eventually finding it really interesting.

And I mean, this is a very old school example, but in the book I tell Jess Whittlestone's story where she was a philosophy student at Oxford and was really interested in philosophy of mind.

And she was like, well, like the thing I feel most interested in is just continuing as a philosopher.

I don't really see how we could have a big impact like that.

And so she just explored lots of other paths, like policy and nonprofits.

And yeah, she went into evidence-based policy, the behavioral insights team.

And then from that, she pivoted into AI ethics and AI policy.

And then she became eventually head of the AI policy team at CLTR, which is the most important AI risk think tank in the UK.

And Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in AI.

But she finds it super interesting now because she's learned the skills in this area and she sees that it's meaningful and she sees why it's important and has interesting colleagues.

Those are the things that make a career interesting even if...

you might not start out already passionate about that topic.

I think it was either 2015 or 2016 where we had the combination of OpenAI being founded

like super intelligence was recently released and then alpha go had, um, just beaten Lisa doll.

And it kind of, that was like deeply deep learning is working.

And so.

at that point, if you extrapolate the trends and we had like a mini call to action, like now is a good time to work on AI.

I mean, I almost wish I'd followed that advice more myself, but people who did follow that advice at the time, now they're often like really high up in the key nonprofits or safety research teams or governments working on these issues today.

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