Do they exist? Sure, I'm exaggerating a little bit. On my current job hunt I try to pay special attention to safety/alignment-related positions, but it seems that a vast majority of them would require me to relocate to either the Bay Area (or the US in general), or London, and I'm just not very eager to do that.
80,000 Hours' job board lets you filter by city. As of the time of writing, roles in their AI Safety & Policy tag are 61/112 San Francisco, 16/112 London, 35/112 other (including remote).
At the Center on Long-Term Risk we're open to remote work. Currently we're only hiring for summer research fellows and the application page states (as with other previous positions, iirc)
Location: We prefer summer research fellows to work from our London offices, but will also consider applications from people who are unable to relocate.
Last year we had one fully remote fellow.
Some people have very good reasons for not wanting to move (family that needs them, tied to partners who are tied to local work, etc), and not saying you're not one of them but still....
...we're talking about the single most consequential events in the history of human civilization (or Earth life, or perhaps the universe since its inception), but you won't get more involved in making them go well because it'd require living somewhere else?
I'm writing this not just for you, but for all the many people who want to help with Alignment/x-risk but seem pretty capped in how much they're willing to give up for that (not claiming that I couldn't give more), but I get a missing mood from many people about it.
Counterpoint:
If the alignment problem is the most important problem in history, shouldn't alignment-focused endeavors be more willing to hire contributors who can't/won't relocate?
It's not like remote work isn't the easiest to implement that it's ever been in all of history.
Of course there needs to be some filtering out of candidates to ensure resources are devoted to the most promising individuals. But I really don't think that willingness to move correlates strongly enough with competence at solving alignment to warrant treating it like a dealbreaker.
I was also looking to do alignment-focused work remotely, and then, while failing to find any appropriate opportunities, had a bit of a wake-up call which led to me changing my mind.
From the "inside", there are some pretty compelling considerations for avoiding remote work.
"Context is that which is scarce" - the less "shovel-ready" the work is, the more important it is to have very high bandwidth communication. I liked remote work at my last job because I was working at a tech company where we had quarterly planning cycles and projects were structured in a way such that everyone working remotely barely made a difference, most of the time. (There were a couple projects near the end where it was clearly a significant drag on our ability to make forward progress, due to the increasing number of stakeholders, and the difficulty of coordinating everything).
LessWrong is a three-person[2] team, and if we spent basically all of our time developing features the way mature tech companies do, we could probably also be remote with maybe only a 30-40% performance penalty. But in fact a good chunk of our effort goes into attempting to backchain from "solve the alignment problem/end the acute risk period" into "what should we actually be doing". This often does involve working on LessWrong, but not 100% of the time. As an example, we're currently in the middle of a two-week "alignment sprint", where we're spending most of our timing diving into object-level research. To say that this style of work[3] benefits from co-location would be understating things.
Now, I do think that LessWrong is on the far end of the spectrum here, but I think this is substantially true for most alignment orgs, given that they tend to be smaller and working in a domain that's both extremely high context and also fairly pre-paradigmatic. In general, coordination and management capacity are severely constrained, and remote work is at its best when you need less coordination effort to achieve good outcomes.
I lived in the Bay Area for a long time, and I was very unhappy there due to the social scene, high cost of living, difficulty getting around, and the homeless problem. I have every reason to believe that London would be just about as bad.
If we're going to die, I'm not going to spend the last years of my life being miserable. Not worth it.
I'm sympathetic to not wanting to live out remaining years being miserable, and think doing so would indeed be a mistake. I also acknowledge that living a good life in the Bay can be harder than than other places, but I also don't think impossible. I do think the challenges can be surmounted with effort and agency, and even then you might be worse off than other places, but still, the stakes are high.
Fwiw I live in London and have been to the Bay Area and I think that London is better across all 4 dimensions you mentioned.
The need to get more organized about this - e.g. via a job noticeboard for remote work on alignment - was mentioned just one month ago.
Fwiw I live in London and have been to the Bay Area and I think that London is better across all 4 dimensions you mentioned.