#244 – Benjamin Todd on how we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history

The average career is 80,000 hours long. With AI advancing so rapidly, the hours you have left in your career matter more than ever.

Some leading AI researchers think there’s a 10% chance that AI systems begin automating AI research itself this year — and a 60% chance by the end of 2028. This could introduce aggressive feedback loops that completely reshape every industry, institution, and career.

If these predictions are right, the window for influencing the direction of the future could be closing fast. As 80,000 Hours cofounder Benjamin Todd argues in his new book, that makes thinking carefully about your career more important than ever.

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to use your career to make the AI transition go well.

In today’s conversation with host Zershaaneh Qureshi, Ben lays out three scenarios — from AGI by 2029 to a decades-long plateau in AI progress — and explains why not everyone needs to bet on the shortest timeline. A fresh graduate and a senior government official have wildly different leverage, so timing your impact well means weighing where you are in your career against the urgency of the risks.

Ben also addresses the obvious anxieties:

Will AI come for all the jobs he’s recommending?
What’s the point in following his advice if the job market is about to collapse?
Which skills are actually worth building right now?

His new book, 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good, provides a surprisingly concrete framework for making career decisions in these radically uncertain times.

This episode was recorded on May 7, 2026.

Learn more and read the full transcript: https://80k.info/bt26

We're hiring: we have lots of open roles at 80,000 Hours — across advising, web, video, and ops — check them out and apply on our website.

Chapters:

Cold open (00:00:00)
Benjamin Todd on AI-era career advice (00:01:34)
A deadline for your career plan? (00:02:21)
Three timelines, one career (00:08:48)
What if you’re not an ‘AI person’? (00:13:55)
Ben’s own AI wake-up call (00:21:23)
How to break into AI safety in 3 months (00:25:42)
Is mass unemployment coming? (00:33:48)
99% automation vs 100% automation (00:40:09)
Don’t become a plumber to dodge AI (00:52:43)
Is it already too late? (01:01:03)

Our production team includes:

Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Music: CORBIT

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(348)

Owain Evans on accidentally training AI models to be evil

Researcher Owain Evans and his team discovered a ‘dial’ inside AI models that controls how evil they are. Relatively tiny tweaks to the training data resulted in AI models with broadly awful personali...

20 Elo 2h 15min

#251 – The UK's former head AI safety scientist on how to solve alignment before superintelligence arrives | Geoffrey Irving

When should governments slow the race toward superintelligence? According to Geoffrey Irving, the careful answer is sometime in the past. The useful answer is now.Geoffrey — formerly a safety research...

11 Elo 2h 2min

#250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong

Both Silicon Valley and the public can’t get enough of ‘AGI timelines.’ But Toby Ord, senior researcher at Oxford’s AI Governance Initiative and author of The Precipice, believes we consistently make ...

6 Elo 2h 46min

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2026? – Rob Wiblin

Last October, famed coder Andrej Karpathy called AI agents “slop.” Two months later he completely reversed his view, describing them as “alien tools” that are “rocking the profession.”He was far from ...

4 Elo 49min

#249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world

If you genuinely believe that humanity could be wiped out by AI or a pandemic, what is the appropriate amount of fear to feel?“As much as possible” can seem like the only reasonable answer. If the wor...

28 Heinä 2h 9min

#248 – Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe

Many AI researchers believe mass job displacement is coming — and some even think there’s a chance their technology will kill everyone. But they’re building it anyway. Writer and journalist Jasmine Su...

21 Heinä 1h 6min

#247 – Anton Leicht on how middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world

In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore?Anton Leicht says once frontier AI becomes a core economic input, the countries that own it will p...

14 Heinä 1h 33min

#246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws

Six years ago, aged just 15, Sneha Revanur founded the AI advocacy nonprofit Encode AI — back when AI felt like a niche issue. Now the world’s caught up with her, and she’s ready to share everything s...

8 Heinä 52min