TL;DR: High Impact Engineers (HI-Eng) has compiled a repository of resources for physical engineers to learn more about how to have impact with their careers and we want to know what we've missed.
Note: any mention of 'engineers' or 'engineering' in this post pertains to physical (ie. non-software) engineering.
The Why
It is commonly the view within EA that moving people down the funnel towards direct work on impactful causes is one of the more impactful outcomes of community building.[1] One of the assumptions of HI-Eng is that there are not enough engineers ready to do impactful work now and there will likely be a greater undersupply in the future if nothing is done to increase the number of engineers ready to do impactful work.
Although the most impactful career trajectories for engineers could be pivoting into AI safety technical research, software engineering, or earning to give, we believe there are still many high-impact opportunities for engineers who want to stay in engineering (for example, in biosecurity or AI governance). Therefore, we see facilitating engineers transitioning to a more impactful career trajectory as one of our core pathways to impact. One way we hope to do this is the provision of information with which engineers can make informed decisions about how to do impactful work over the course of their careers.
The Resources
Our first iterative step down this path is our Resources for Engineers page - a collection of resources relevant to engineers that we've collated over the last few months at HI-Eng. We list a handful of cause areas with a brief explanation of their relevance to engineers and some key resources to learn more. Additionally, we offer a more comprehensive list of resources that are filterable by engineering discipline, cause area, and more. It is our hope that this can serve as a central repository for resources that help engineers to learn more about the cause areas and projects that are relevant to them having greater impact with their career. We will be continuously adding to it and expanding the cause area list as we find more resources and we want your help to do so!
What are we missing and how can you help?
We are certain we are missing relevant resources so we set up this form for anyone to recommend resources to add to our repository. If you have resources that may be relevant for physical engineers, please recommend them.
We'll review every suggestion before making a decision on whether to share it on our site, so if you're unsure about a resource to suggest we would like you to err on the side of recommending it.
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For example, to keep up with and reduce the funding overhang in EA.
This is great! I would suggest adding another cause area of civilizational resilience as being in need of engineers. And shameless plug for the PhD students and temporary researcher in engineering that I will be hiring at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand to do ALLFED-related work.
Civilisational resilience is a cause area that we're definitely looking to add! If you've got any recommended starting points for engineers to learn more about the area, I'd love to know.
Here are some ALLFED resources, here are mainly non-ALLFED resources, a couple of which I'd like to particularly highlight: Defence in Depth and The Knowledge. There is also Luisa Rodriguez's work, e.g. this.
A question about this--do you work at the University of Canterbury now, or will you be supervising these students remotely?
I will be starting an associate professor position in mechanical engineering at the University of Canterbury in January 2023.