Thank you!
After graduating, why would you need to be based in Kagoshima?
I need to be based in Kagoshima for pretty strong personal reasons. Sorry for not providing details. If you really need them, I can tell you more via PM.
Ah, you write »after graduating«? Sorry for not providing that detail: research students in Japan are not working on a master's or PhD. They're just hanging around studying or doing research and hopefully learn something during that time.
Have you taken a look at the content on MIRI's to practice AI safety research?
Yes, I've read all of the agenda papers and some more.
Have you considered applying to visit AI safety researchers at MIRI or FHI? That would help you to figure out where your interests and theirs overlap, and to consider how you might contribute.
I applied for the MIRI Summer Fellows Programme, which I didn't get into by a small margin, and CFAR's Workshop on AI Safety Strategy, which I also didn't get into. They told me they might put me in the next one. That would definitely help me with my questions, but I thought it's better to start early, so I asked here.
If you're not eligible to visit for some reason, that might imply that you're further from being useful than you thought.
I am at the very beginning of learning ML and AI and therefore kind of far from being useful. I know this. But I'm quite good at maths and computer science and a range of other things, so I thought contributing to AI safety research shouldn't be too far to go. It will just take time. (Just as a master's programme would take time, for example.) The hard part is to get hold of money to sustain myself during that time.
I might be useful for other things than research directly, such as support software development, teaching, writing, outreach, organizing. I haven't done much teaching, outreach and organization, but I would be interested to try more.
I don't really know of any ai researchers in our extended network out of some dozens who've managed to be taken very seriously without being colocated with other top researchers, so without knowing more, it still seems moderately likely to me that the best plan involves doing something like earning while practising math, or studying a PhD, with the intent to move in 2-3 years, depending on when you can't move until.
Otherwise, it seems like you're doing the right things, but until you put out some papers or something, I think I'd sooner direct funding to pr...
(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.)