I am curious to what extent the info in this post is common knowledge. Are these things familiar to people?

I'm definitely interested in subsequent posts on sleep, so please continue posting. I don't want to practice polyphasic sleep or super-optimize sleep anyway, rather just generally improve the quality of sleep, because I sleep much and still wake up feeling like crap.

I kindly ask you, however, to change the font to defaults and break paragraphs with 2 lines instead of indentation, it makes it much more readable.

People shooting other people with blaster rifles and flying spaceships sounds cool too.

I mean that the physical information which defines - or alternatively is required to reconstruct - a human mind is not strictly localized in space to the confines of a single brain.

Using the hardware/software analogy, the brain is the hardware, the mind is the software, but the mind is distributed software: each mind program runs mainly on a single brain, but it also has partial cached copies distributed on other brains.

For example, if two people spend a bunch of time together, they are going to have many shared memories. Later if both die and the brain of one is preserved, the shared memories are useful for constructing both minds. With many preserved brains, you get multiple viewpoints for many overlapping memories which allow for more precise reconstruction.

There is a not necessarily large, but definitely significant chance that developing machine intelligence compatible with human values may very well be the single most important thing that humans have or will ever do, and it seems very likely that economic forces will make strong machine intelligence happen soon, even if we're not ready for it.

So I have two questions about this: firstly, and this is probably my youthful inexperience talking (a big part of why I'm posting this here), but I see so many rationalists do so much awesome work on things like social justice, social work, medicine, and all kinds of poverty-focused effective altruism, but how can it be that the ultimate fate of humanity to either thrive beyond imagination or perish utterly may rest on our actions in this century, and yet people who recognize this possibility don't do everything they can to make it go the way we need it to? This sort of segues in to my second question, which is what is the most any person, more specifically, I can do for FAI? I'm still in high school, so there really isn't that much keeping me from devoting my life to helping the cause of making sure AI is friendly. What would that look like? I'm a village idiot by LW standards, and especially bad at math, so I don't think I'd be very useful on the "front lines" so to speak, but perhaps I could try to make a lot of money and do FAI-focused EA? I might be more socially oriented/socially capable than many here, perhaps I could try to raise awareness or lobby for legislation?

people who recognize this possibility don't do everything they can to make it go the way we need it to

Despite all talking about rationality, we are still humans with all typical human flaws. Also, it is not obvious which way it needs to go. Even if we had unlimited and infinitely fast processing power, and could solve mathematically all kinds of problems related to Löb's theorem, I still would have no idea how we could start transferring human values to the AI, considering that even humans don't understand themselves, and ideas like "AI should find a way to make humans smile" can lead to horrible outcomes. So maybe the first step would be to upload some humans and give them more processing power, but humans can also be horrible (and the horrible ones are actually more likely to seize such power), and the changes caused by uploading could make even nice people go insane.

So, what is the obvious next step, other than donating some money to the research, which will most likely conclude that further research is needed? I don't want to discourage anyone who donates or does the research, just saying that the situation with the research is frustrating by its lack of feedback. On the scale where 0 is the first electronic computer and 100 is the Friendly AI, are we at least at point 1? If we happen to be there, how would we know that?