Researcher

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Researcher at The Future of Life Foundation

About FLF

The Future of Life Foundation (FLF) is distinct but affiliated with the Future of Life Institute. Our shared mission is to steer transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.

FLF focuses primarily on identifying gaps or relatively neglected efforts to fulfilling this mission, and marshalling resources to fill those gaps. To date this has involved establishing new organisations, generating new teams within established organisations, incubating fellows or nascent projects, and communicating our visions more widely in publications and workshops.

We expect our most significant focus to remain on the risks posed by transformative AI, and governance mechanisms needed to ensure that AI is beneficial to humanity. Other areas of work could include biosecurity, nuclear technology, other risks to humanity’s existence or fulfillment of its potential, and the development of tools, institutions, and communities that support these efforts.

A major (but not exclusive) focus so far has been AI tools for collective human agency: taking advantage of (and steering) new prospects from AI building blocks to differentially enable human societal decision-making during this crucial period. You can see more of our thinking on our website.

About the Role

To maintain and improve these activities, FLF needs situational awareness, insight, and generative vision: this is where researchers come in. In short, researchers work on sourcing and developing ambitious ideas to build a flourishing future, grounded in realistic scenarios for AI and other technological development. Together with the team, researchers apply their expertise, capacity for insight, network and skills to shaping these projects and nascent organisations into their best form.

You’ll be joining a team ‘in motion’, with some tentative worldview and strategy ‘bets’ already in play, but we remain open to the possibility that further strategy research updates or expands these. We want open-minded researchers who are happy to be challenged and to challenge in turn.

Besides high-level worldview and strategy, several roadmaps in motion and yet to be developed will benefit from insight and exceptional critique. Your work will often involve uncovering the best versions of a prospect as well as highlighting challenges or essential desiderata and considerations that we haven’t mapped out yet.

Researchers generally benefit from excellent generalist thinking, but there are several areas of specialisation which we anticipate being especially valuable:

• AI safety (technical, governance, strategy)

• AI generally (LMs and beyond) and enterprise-scale software

• Political science, human (social) behaviour

• Systems theory, cybernetics, and systems safety

• Economics, especially macroeconomics of automation and labour displacement

• Law, especially corporate law, contracting, liability, and tort law

Activities

The following are primary responsibilities of the research function at FLF: any researcher will be working or co-working on these activities with a majority of their time. Where noted, ‘wider team support’ refers to crossover activities shared with other functions, especially likely to be cross-function collaborative. These run roughly in lifecycle order, from noticing what matters, to designing an intervention, to helping launch and shape it. Researchers stay involved across that arc.

Foresight and worldview

• Maintain and improve FLF’s situational awareness and scenario foresight, especially regarding AI and its interactions with technology and society

• Notice and surface potentially impactful trends or scenarios; articulate important ‘arenas’ for FLF to pay attention to

• Collaborate with partners and contacts outside of FLF on priorities and potential collaborations

Envisioning and design

• Anticipate a) civilisational vulnerabilities and disruptions and b) opportunities for positive civilisational change, especially regarding AI

• Collect seed ideas/visions (or innovate afresh) for types of intervention to progress toward positive change on vulnerabilities or opportunities

• Investigate early visions for feasibility, core challenges, and downside risks

• (With wider team support) research existing or prior related efforts and synthesise learnings, considering what might have changed, or what new insight or advantage FLF has (or could have)

• (With wider team support) develop (socio)technological designs and roadmaps for tech, institutions, organisations, or initiatives bringing FLF’s ambitions into fruition

• Estimate relative promise of proposals at varying stages of readiness: from early gestures to more defined roadmaps

Organization Formation, Advising, and Award Review

• Work alongside FLF’s project development staff and founders to take promising roadmaps from concept to launch: sharpening the thesis, defining early milestones, and shaping the initial team and strategy

• Act as a research advisor to nascent projects and organisations as they form, bringing domain expertise, critique, and connections

• Evaluate projects in motion: surface where they are drifting from their theory of change or missing key considerations, and inform decisions to continue, expand, or redirect

Outward communication

• (With wider team support) deliver workshops, presentations, and reports to share vision and roadmaps with partners or publicly

• Contribute to recruitment pipeline for promising roadmaps: direct search, RFPs, job descriptions, reviewing, interviewing

• Interact with existing or prospective fellows/founders to inspire, brainstorm, refine etc.

Tooling

• (With wider team support) contribute to tooling, especially AI workflows, to support and compound all of the above activities

Likely Qualifications

• Demonstrated willingness and ability to seriously consider a range of scenarios and risks from AI

• Proven ability to perform high-quality research, preferably in AI, existential risk, or a relevant domain (political science, systems safety, economics, law, …)

• Strong analytical, critical-thinking, communication, and problem-solving skills

• Passion for helping to further AI safety

Additional Possible Qualifications

• Penchant for high-quality writing (informative, understandable, appealing/approachable); perhaps an existing relevant platform or network

• Familiarity with government and/or national security and adjacent thinktanks or suppliers

• Experience developing and distributing software and AI applications

• Experience with the founding of new organizations

• Significant research achievement demonstrated by publications in top-tier conferences and journals coupled with years of pertinent academic experience

• A track-record of impactful grantmaking

• History of performing technical research beyond AI safety

• A particularly strong technical background

Logistics

You will be an employee of the Future of Life Foundation, or our affiliated organization, the Future of Life Institute. Each are 501(c)(3) research non-profits.

• Compensation and Benefits: Compensation is competitive with Bay Area tech roles (excluding equity), plus full benefits.

• Location: The team is currently geographically distributed through North America and Western Europe, and we can welcome applicants from a wide range of locations. We should be able to sponsor US visas (without going through the visa lottery) for those who need them. We meet in person several times per year in varied locations.

Miscellaneous

If this posting is live, the role is still open. Timelines are short and we’d like to make this hire ASAP.

We are committed to diversity and equal opportunity in all aspects of our hiring process. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We welcome and encourage all qualified candidates to apply for our open positions.