Here are one piece of advice I have for people who are getting started in AI safety. (This advice comes with the usual caveat that it doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone, you should consider whether the opposite advice applies, etc.)

The AI safety community is a extremely diverse group of people who are motivated by some similar goals and share some beliefs but have a lot of major disagreements. My most important piece of advice is to think carefully about these disagreements for yourself and consider the arguments from all sides. One default failure mode is to place inappropriately high weight on the opinions and arguments of the people you happen to be around and to discount the ideas which are less popular in your particular subgroup.

You should identify and think carefully about the disagreements in the following areas:

• basic philosophies of ethics and minds
• different theories of change
• how to think about pursuing so called ‘dual use’ research
• risk weightings (e.g. balancing prioritization of mitigating xrisk vs power concentration vs gradual disempowerment, etc)
• what kinds of human structures, e.g. relationships with frontier labs, are productive

The best way to learn about these arguments is probably to spend a lot of time reading old blog posts, especially posts on LessWrong, and then writing about what interests you.