The AI Safety Pledge

Note: this is a very early draft, not a fully fledged proposal. I am currently entertained by the idea of an AI Safety Pledge, but not convinced that it's useful and desirable

Inspired by the Founder's Pledge and the 10% Pledge, we can offer people transitioning to an AI safety career to make an AI Safety Pledge. It could look something like this:

1. I pledge to spend the coming years of my career on AI safety.
2. If I don't manage to do so, for example because I can't find a job in AI Safety, I will donate 10% of my income to the AI safety movement.
3. If I ever do decide to move back into AI safety, I can receive back my contributions to support my AI safety work.

Theory of Change

Hopefully, this pledge will:

• incentivize people to try harder to complete their career transition to AI safety
• create more buy-in towards keeping people accountable to their good intentions, e.g. through a virtual career coach.
• decrease the effective income gap between non-safety work (which would now be reduced by 10%) and AI safety work
• incentivize people to keep trying moving back to AI safety even if they weren't successful initially

Some of the risks:

• it might stimulate earning-to-give, which 80'000 hours currently views as less effective than direct career contributions.
• it might be perceived by the outside world as cult-like
• AI safety work may be hard to define

To do:

• Visualize the theory of change as causal chains
• Talk to people in the field to gauge opinions
• Look for existing similar ideas