Global issues beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities (Article)

Global issues beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities (Article)

Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.

In this one, we go through 30 global issues beyond the ones we usually prioritize most highly in our work, and that you might consider focusing your career on tackling.

Although we spend the majority of our time at 80,000 Hours on our highest priority problem areas, and we recommend working on them to many of our readers, these are just the most promising issues among those we’ve spent time investigating. There are many other global issues that we haven’t properly investigated, and which might be very promising for more people to work on.

In fact, we think working on some of the issues in this article could be as high-impact for some people as working on our priority problem areas — though we haven’t looked into them enough to be confident.

If you want to check out the links in today’s article, you can find those here.

Our annual user survey is also now open for submissions.

Once a year for two weeks we ask all of you, our podcast listeners, article readers, advice receivers, and so on, so let us know how we've helped or hurt you.

80,000 Hours now offers many different services, and your feedback helps us figure out which programs to keep, which to cut, and which to expand.

This year we have a new section covering the podcast, asking what kinds of episodes you liked the most and want to see more of, what extra resources you use, and some other questions too.

We're always especially interested to hear ways that our work has influenced what you plan to do with your life or career, whether that impact was positive, neutral, or negative.

That might be a different focus in your existing job, or a decision to study something different or look for a new job. Alternatively, maybe you're now planning to volunteer somewhere, or donate more, or donate to a different organisation.

Your responses to the survey will be carefully read as part of our upcoming annual review, and we'll use them to help decide what 80,000 Hours should do differently next year.

So please do take a moment to fill out the user survey.

You can find it at 80000hours.org/survey

Get this episode by subscribing: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the linked transcript.

Producer: Keiran Harris.
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell.
Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.

Episoder(324)

#238 – Sam Winter-Levy and Nikita Lalwani on how AGI won't end mutually assured destruction (probably)

#238 – Sam Winter-Levy and Nikita Lalwani on how AGI won't end mutually assured destruction (probably)

How AI interacts with nuclear deterrence may be the single most important question in geopolitics — one that may define the stakes of today’s AI race. Nuclear deterrence rests on a state’s capacity to...

10 Mar 1h 11min

Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen before — and with less time to get them right. But AI ...

6 Mar 31min

#237 – Robert Long on how we're not ready for AI consciousness

#237 – Robert Long on how we're not ready for AI consciousness

Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re not.’ What do we do with...

3 Mar 3h 25min

#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed

#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed

Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design is an AGI that defers entirely to its human operators, ...

24 Feb 2h 41min

#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’

#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’

Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It sounds circular, almos...

17 Feb 2h 54min

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of ...

10 Feb 25min

#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young p...

3 Feb 2h 51min

#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy

#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy

Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the “gradual disempowerment” of ...

27 Jan 2h 31min

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