Consider more carefully your ranking of preferences, and expand your horizons quite a bit. There're lots of ways to improve the predicted future state of humanity that are less direct, but possibly more effective, than this particular topic.
I care about the current and future state of humanity
That's sweet of you. I'm glad.
so I think it's good to work on existential or global catastrophic risk
That's a pretty big jump. I'll grant that human existential risk is important, but why is your best contribution to work directly on it? Perhaps you'd do a lot more good with a slight reduction in shipping costs or tiny improvements in safety or enjoyment of some consumer product. In the likely case that your marginal contribution to x-risk doesn't save the world, a small improvement for a large number of people does massive amounts more good.
Regardless of whether you focus on x-risk or something else valuable, the fact that you won't consider leaving Kagoshima is an indication that you aren't as fully committed as you claim. IMO, that's ok: we all have personal desires that we put ahead of the rest of the world. But you should acknowledge it and include it in your calculations.
Perhaps you'd do a lot more good with a slight reduction in shipping costs or tiny improvements in safety or enjoyment of some consumer product.
Perhaps you would also do more good by working in a slight increase in shipping costs.
(I'm re-posting my question from the Welcome thread, because nobody answered there.)
I care about the current and future state of humanity, so I think it's good to work on existential or global catastrophic risk. Since I've studied computer science at a university until last year, I decided to work on AI safety. Currently I'm a research student at Kagoshima University doing exactly that. Before April this year I had only little experience with AI or ML. Therefore, I'm slowly digging through books and articles in order to be able to do research.
I'm living off my savings. My research student time will end in March 2017 and my savings will run out some time after that. Nevertheless, I want to continue AI safety research, or at least work on X or GC risk.
I see three ways of doing this:
Oh, and I need to be location-independent or based in Kagoshima.
I know http://futureoflife.org/job-postings/, but all of the job postings fail me in two ways: not location-independent and requiring more/different experience than I have.
Can anyone here help me? If yes, I would be happy to provide more information about myself.
(Note that I think I'm not in a precarious situation, because I would be able to get a remote software development job fairly easily. Just not in AI safety or X or GC risk.)