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How to make the most important choice of your life

You have 80,000 hours in your career. How will you spend them?

The average person works 80,000 hours over the course of their career. Ideally, that time should be fulfilling, well-paid, and spent doing things that make the world a better place.

Of course that’s much, much easier said than done. In an increasingly fragile job market made still more fraught by AI, there’s no longer such a thing as a safe bet.

According to Benjamin Todd, most people lack a systematic approach to thinking about their career choice. Todd is the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people move into careers focused on tackling the “world’s most pressing problems” — issues that include AI safety, biosecurity, global health, and animal welfare. 80,000 Hours uses the effective altruism framework of importance, neglectedness (how many resources are devoted to the problem), and tractability (or solvability) to decide which causes to prioritize.

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In his new book 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good, which was released this week, Todd pulls together more than a decade of research and advising into a guide for making career decisions. It’s aimed at people just starting out as well as more experienced workers looking to make a switch, providing a framework to make career choices.

I spoke with Todd about careers and skill sets that are more resistant or adaptable to AI job disruptions, why “going with your gut” (usually) isn’t good advice, tips for landing a high-impact job offer, and other topics.

Our conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

There’s a lot of anxiety around advances in AI and job displacement, how that affects people’s job prospects and how they should think about career choices.

Yeah, I feel like when I talk to people about their careers these days, that’s the main thing that’s on their mind. … I think a lot of the simple answers about which jobs will be best [in the age of AI] are too simple.

How have the last few years — thinking about AI but also other disruptions and changes to the job market — changed your core assumptions about how people should choose their careers?

The main thing that comes to mind is we seem to be getting more and more evidence that far more capable AI will be here soon.

Then I think that just has a lot of implications for which problems are most pressing, and then potentially also which skills are most valuable. If there’s going to be a lot of change and things will be more unpredictable 10 years from now, then it makes sense to focus on shorter-term plans than to spend 10 years training to do something. Starting medical school now seems a lot more risky than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago.

When you say AI is coming and going to change things, are you talking about artificial general intelligence (AGI) specifically?

I mean there’s multiple levels. I think [where the technology is now], if it just froze here, would be kind of similar to the internet and how important it was. But the big-picture thing that seems most important is the idea that you could get to some kind of AI that can do a lot of remote work jobs at roughly a human level. That seems like it could bring the economy and science into a significantly different regime.

I’m probably a bit more skeptical than most technologists of mass near-term unemployment from AI, though I also think that most economists are still underrating how big a deal it could eventually be.

You mention in the book that managing AI agents is a skill less likely to be replaced by AI. Why is that?

I talk about four things that could make skills become more valuable in the future given technology and automation. And the second one is complementarity to AI. So it’s not that AI won’t be able to do that, it’s that it’s a skill where as AI gets better, that skill becomes more........

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