AI Safety Pledge

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.

Note: this is a very early idea, 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. I'm posting it here to see what opinions people have about this.

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

What do you think? Could this be useful? What assumptions would need to be true for this to be impactful? What could be a simple way of testing those assumptions?