Is the goal of the community really to get everyone into the one task of creating FAI? I'm kind of new here, but I'm personally interested in a less direct but maybe more certain (I don't know the hard numbers) (but, I feel, its synergistic), goal of achieving a stable post-scarcity economy which could free up a lot more people to become hackers/makers of technology and participate in the collective commons, but I'm interested in FAI and particularly machine ethics, and I hang out here because of the rationality and self improvement angles. In fact I got into my current academic track (embedded systems) because I'm interested in robotics and embodied intelligence, and probably got started reading Hofstadter stuff and trying to puzzle out how minds work.

"Come for the rationality... stay for the friendly AI" maybe?