Yeah, that would be great indeed. Unfortunately my Japanese is so rudimentary that I can't even explain to my landlord that I need a big piece of cloth to hang it in front of my window (just to name an example). :-( I'm making progress, but getting a handle on Japanese is about as time-consuming as getting a handle on ML, although more mechanical.
Do you get the impression that Japan has numerous benevolent and talented researchers who could and would contribute meaningfully to AI safety work? If so, it seems possible to me that your comparative advantage is in evangelism rather than research (subject to the constraint that you're staying in Japan indefinitely). If you're able to send multiple qualified Japanese researchers west, that's potentially more than you'd be able to do as an individual.
You'd still want to have thorough knowledge of the issues yourself, if only to convince Japanese researchers that the problems were interesting.
(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.)