It's best long-term way, probably. But if you estimate it'll take 50 years to get a FAI and that some of the existential risks have a significant probability of happening in 10 or 20 years, then you better should try to address them without requiring FAI - or you're likely to never reach the FAI stage.

In 7 billions of humans, it's sane to have some individual to focus on FAI now, since it's a hard problem, so we have to start early; but it's also normal for not all of us to focus on FAI, but to focus also on other ways to mitigate the existential risks that we estimate are likely to occur before FAI/uFAI.