So you think that other people could contribute much more to x-risk
"marginal" in that sentence was meant literally - the additional contribution to the cause that you're considering. Actually, I think there's not much room for anybody to contribute large amounts to x-risk mitigation. Most people (and since I know nothing of you, I put you in that class) will do more good for humanity by working at something that improves near-term situations than by working on theoretical and unlikely problems.
So you think there's not much we can do about x-risk? What makes you think that? Or, alternatively, if you think that only few people who can do much good in x-risk mitigation, what properties enable them to do that?
Oh, and why do you consider AI safety a "theoretical [or] unlikely" problem?
(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.)