EOI: Project Lead / Founder - Windfall Trust
Anywhere in the World
FLF /
Full-Time, Contract /
Remote
The Future of Life Foundation (FLF) is seeking a driven individual to lead efforts to bring the Windfall Trust (WT) project to fruition. You’ll be responsible for hiring a founding team to support you, and will be provided with operations support, research support, and significant funding runway.
You would be a good fit for this role if:
1. You have previous experience founding an organization, managing large-scale projects, working across borders, and a knack for hiring standout talent.
2. You’re enthused about balancing efficiency with robustness, understanding that this ambitious vision will sometimes necessitate meticulous and irreproachable execution in both work and decision-making.
3. You find the vision, missions, and associated potential positive impacts this organization can have to be highly motivating.
4. You have a track record in public speaking, media engagements, partnership building, and representing an organization professionally and charismatically.
About the Project
As AI inches closer towards human-level intelligence, we stand on the brink of profound transformations in our society and in the workforce.
The Windfall Clause is a proposed mechanism whereby AI labs legally pre-commit to sharing profits generated by their creations if their profits exceed a predetermined threshold, such as a fraction of the world’s GDP. It serves as a proactive response to the potential exponential wealth accumulation resulting from transformative AI. It also helps to limit the economic upside of AI labs, realign dangerous AI race incentives, and ensure equitable distribution of wealth by redirecting excess profits towards broader societal benefits.
But how would such profits be distributed? What if there existed a fund that belonged to all of humanity – where everyone born on earth would be entitled to an equal share in its corpus?
The Windfall Trust is an ambitious initiative aimed at researching and establishing a robust international institution that could be a target for an AI windfall and provide universal basic assets.
The project entails developing and creating a fully fleshed-out trust, encompassing legal and financial structures, investment principles, payout algorithms, governance frameworks, and funding plans. Its overarching goal is to capture an AI windfall in a way that fosters economic stability by distributing income from the trust, potentially starting with the most economically vulnerable, to establish a universal human income floor. We believe this vision can be robust to whether or not key actors do adopt the Windfall Clause.
We’re looking to establish the first iteration of this trust this year. Now more than ever, it’s imperative to imagine and cultivate the institutions that will shape our collective future, paving the way for a society where every individual can thrive.
Key Responsibilities
The ideal candidate should be prepared to take full ownership of the Windfall Trust project. Over a 1 year period, we expect this to include:
- Incorporating an operational organization by September 2024
- Preparing for a public launch by EOY 2024
- Overseeing and implementing the legal, financial, research, and communications work needed. We expect this will involve hiring, partnering with, and managing a diverse team of experts, including researchers, governance, policy, & legal advisors, communications staff, and financial personnel.
Logistics
- Status: You’ll initially be hired by FLF. When an independent organization is launched with FLF’s support, we expect you’ll transition to being employed by that entity.
- Location: The position is fully remote, and we expect that you can be located anywhere in the world with a reliable internet connection for the foreseeable future. We expect this organization to be global and largely remote for the long-run as well, but it will likely be first incorporated in Switzerland. Willingness to work ~3+ hours per day that overlap with working hours in the Central European Time Zone would be an advantage.
- Travel: We expect a willingness to travel internationally to be an important component of this, as the WT works to coordinate and build rapport with stakeholders, researchers, and advisors worldwide.
- Pay: Compensation is competitive and commensurate with experience & qualifications.
Expression of Interest (EOI)
FLF expects to discover the right founder for the Windfall Trust through targeted headhunting. We’re posting this 'Expression of Interest' on the off-chance that the right founder finds us (rather than the other way around), but we’re not treating this like a job ad. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to respond to most submissions, and we plan to concentrate our focus on only the most promising candidates.
