Curated AI Career Advice

Links on how to personally and professionally prepare for the AI progress.

“All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.”
- Montaigne

Keeping up feels like a full-time job.

SF has a weird obsession with long-form web essays. Deeply valuable papers and blog posts are either hard to read, hard to find, or both. Nobody knows exactly what AI means for you or your career, but I can tell you this: AI is important.

Simultaneously, giving advice is hard. Giving career advice is even harder — let alone right before the biggest economic shift since the Industrial Revolution.

So, for now, I’ll take the low-hanging fruit and make a list instead. The below includes links to analysis and advice I’ve found useful over the last year.

They roughly answer the following questions:

1. What’s happening with AI progress?

2. How will AI affect the economy and jobs?

3. How should you prepare?

AI has even automated modifying memes (original).

To avoid needing a 16th list, I’ll do my best to keep this updated. Please message me at saheb4gulati@gmail.com or on Signal (sahebgulati.80) if you have suggestions or questions.

The List(s)

Core List (~5 hours)

If you do nothing else, I recommend:

1. We're Not Ready for Superintelligence, AI in Context*

2. The Future of AI Course, BlueDot Impact*

3. What Happens When AI Replaces Workers?, Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine

4. Will AI Automate Away Your Job?, Jason Hausenloy*

5. Humans Need Not Apply, CGP Grey

6. Pyramid Replacement, Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine

7. Now is the Time for Moonshots, Luke Drago*

8. Move fast and make things, Reid Hoffman

9. How not to lose your job to AI, Ben Todd*

10. escaping flatland: career advice for CS undergrads, Euan Ong

11. How to Do Great Work, Paul Graham

General List (~10-15 hours)

1. Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen*

2. The case for AGI by 2030, Ben Todd

3. Youth Lockout, Xavi Costafreda-Fu*

4. The Intelligence Curse, Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine*

5. Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, Leopold Aschenbrenner*

6. For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here, Kevin Roose

7. I’m a LinkedIn Executive. I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking., Aneesh Raman

8. This A.I. Company Wants to Take Your Job, Kevin Roose

9. A Taxonomy of Jobs Deeply Resistant to TAI Automation, Deric Cheng*

10. What fully automated firms will look like, Dwarkesh Patel

11. Waves, Not Mountains: Overcoming Apathy Towards AGI, Dhruv Samathi*

12. Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear?, Scott Alexander

13. No One Knows Anything About AI, Cal Newport*

14. AI: Practical Advice for the Worried, Zvi Mowshowitz

15. How can an ordinary person prepare for AGI?, Ben Todd

16. Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market, Kyla Scanlon

17. You have about 36 months to make it, Dan Koe

18. The Last Job You’ll Ever Have, Jason Hausenloy

19. Young People Can't Get Jobs. Now What?, Lawrence Lundy-Bryan

20. The Thing You Are Expert at Will Be Your Career Downfall, Julie Zhuo

21. The Great Unbundling of Work, Rahim Hirji

22. The Future of Taste, Luke Drago

23. Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?, Paul Graham

24. How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era, Lightcone Podcast*

25. Jobs, growth, and the AI economy (45:46), The OpenAI Podcast

26. Career Advice Given AGI, How I'd Start From Scratch (10:52), Dwarkesh Podcast

27. Career Planning for the AGI Era, 80,000 Hours

28. Agency is Eating the World, Gianluca Segato*

29. How to increase your surface area for luck, Cate Hall*

30. How To Be Successful, Sam Altman

31. How to Work Hard, Paul Graham

32. What You'll Wish You'd Known, Paul Graham

33. How to Think for Yourself, Paul Graham

Wildcard List (~20+ hours)

1. You can learn anything in 2 weeks, Dan Koe*

2. Advice for ambitious teenagers, Laura Deming

3. College advice for people who are exactly like me, Ben Kuhn

4. Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?, D. Graham Burnett

5. Let the AI Agents Organize Your Google Drive, Jason Hausenloy

6. AI Safety Career Advice! (And So Can You!), Robert Miles*

7. Why AGI could be here soon and what you can do about it, Ben Todd

8. Data is the new Social Security Number, Luke Drago

9. Dirty Work: The Return of Blue Collar, Lawrence Lundy-Bryan

10. Yes, you will lose your job to AI, Personal Math

11. AI & Jobs: Two Phases Of Automation, by Anton Leicht*

12. Grounding the Conversation About AI, by Steve Newman

13. First, They Came for the Software Engineers, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman

14. Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner, Dwarkesh Patel

15. Stop pretending you know what AI does to the economy, Noah Smith

16. Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI, Noah Smith*

17. How fast is AI improving?, AI Digest

18. AI Can or Can't, AI Digest

19. A new Moore's Law for AI agents, AI Digest

20. Machines of Loving Grace, Dario Amodei*

21. A History of the Future (1, 2, 3), by Rudolf Laine

22. Forging a New AGI Social Contract: Research Agenda, Deric Cheng*

23. Explosive Growth from AI: A Review of the Arguments, Epoch AI

24. How much economic growth from AI should we expect, how soon?, Jack Wiseman and Duncan McClements

25. How to fully automate software engineering, Mechanize Inc.

26. Transformative AI, existential risk, and real interest rates*, Trevor Chow, et al.

27. Strategic Wealth Accumulation Under Transformative AI Expectations, Caleb Maresca

28. GATE: Modeling the Trajectory of AI and Automation, Epoch AI

29. AGI could drive wages below subsistence level, Epoch AI

30. GPTs are GPTs: Labor market impact potential of LLMs, Tyna Eloundou, et al.

31. Scenarios for the Transition to AGI, Anton Korinek and Donghyun Suh

32. Ten Hard Problems in AI (#5 and #10), Gavin Leech, et al.

Good luck.