Giving Compass' Take:

• Here is a list of high-impact careers that could make a difference long term, along with an explanation about job effectiveness and growth potential. 

• How can donors spread awareness about these career opportunities or invest in them? How can these high impact careers help change the philanthropic ecosystem? 

• Read about how to find a more impactful job. 

Below we list some more career options beyond our priority paths that seem promising to us for positively influencing the long-term future.

Some of these are likely to be written up as priority paths in the future, or wrapped into existing ones, but we haven’t written full profiles for them yet—for example policy careers outside AI and biosecurity policy that seem promising from a longtermist perspective.

Others, like information security, we think might be as promising for many people as our priority paths, but because we haven’t investigated them much we’re still unsure.

Finally some—like becoming a public intellectual—clearly have the potential for a lot of impact, but we can’t recommend them widely because they don’t have the capacity to absorb a large number of people, are particularly risky, or both.

We compiled the list below by asking 6 advisers about paths they think are currently undervalued—including by 80,000 Hours. If something was suggested twice, we took that as a presumption in favor of including it.

  • Become a historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress, or collapse
  • Become a specialist on Russia, India, or another potentially powerful country
  • Become an expert in AI hardware
  • Information security
  • Become a public intellectual
  • Journalism
  • Policy careers that are promising from a longtermist perspective
  • Be research manager or a PA for someone doing really valuable work
  • Become an expert on formal verification
  • Use your skills to meet a need in the effective altruism community
  • Nonprofit entrepreneurship
  • Non-technical roles in leading AI labs
  • Explore a potentially pressing problem area

Read the full article about high-impact careers by Arden Koehler at 80,000 Hours.