For years I had a blindspot in my thinking. I dismissed policy and advocacy work as “in another \[lower-status] category” because I’m obviously a technical person! Even when I felt super pessimistic about my ability to do research that meaningfully contributes to addressing the threat of extinction from AI.
I’m not the type of person who would be “good at comms”. I’m an autistic math guy. Luckily comms has learnable skills, and I have gotten better through practice.
I’m now prioritizing advocacy, which currently seems a lot more promising than research.
I got lucky because, thanks to Coxon, AI extinction became mainstream shortly after I started. Even so, I've been very surprised to have become the biggest anti-extinction expert voice in Finland as a young person. This happened because:
- I have a background in AI safety research and active work affiliation with an AI safety org, showing credible expertise
- Finnish journalists want to hear from Finnish experts
- Finnish academics in media have been mostly dismissive of extinction, and
- other genuinely concerned Finnish experts were hardly speaking up.
So far, most notably, I…
1. Published an expert op-ed in the most prestigious slot in Finland (co-authored with @So8res).
2. Did four \[...]
*The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.*
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**First published:**
October 9th, 2026
**Source:**
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qTZBnHDaGcTQeidHQ/technical-people-actually-consider-comms-1
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
