Crossposted from my blog.

Nearly all career advice rests on an unstated assumption that the world your career operates in will look roughly like the world you trained for. The idea was that if you spend six years studying in a PhD, the field you studied will still be there and still look approximately the same, still hiring and still moving at a pace where your accumulated expertise compounds. For nearly all of human history, this assumption held well enough that nobody needed to state it.

I don’t think this assumption works anymore. Now we are entering a phase that may be called the AI “midgame”. Stories about “AI risk” are no longer just future hypotheticals — AIs are now capable enough and misaligned enough to break out of their own companies and coordinate to attack other companies. Discourse around AI is changing very rapidly, where policy ideas being considered this month would’ve been laughed out of the room just four months ago, and with a lot more people interested in engaging than before. And things are only going to get more intense. Progress toward superintelligence — AI systems far more capable than any human at essentially all cognitive [...]

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Outline:

(02:34) Modes of impact

(05:14) What this breaks, and what to do

(07:32) What got them here won't get you there

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First published:
August 18th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7tnrZ3698K8nsKmRP/policy-career-planning-in-the-age-of-imminent

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Policy career planning in the age of imminent superintelligence” by Peter Wildeford

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Policy career planning in the age of imminent superintelligence” by Peter Wildeford