A couple addendums:

1) If you have a family, your death goes on the "would financially ruin you" list. If anyone needs you, you need life insurance - and term is extremely cheap(I just sold a couple half a million each for $50/mo), so don't use money as an excuse unless you're destitute or extremely ill. To a lesser extent, disability insurance(though it tends to be pricier).

2) You may not want to ever retire, but the human body in old age is a very insistent creature. Plan on retiring. Better to have and not need than need and not have.

You very probably have not all recommended insurances in your country of residence or your mandatory insurance doesn't cover everything you'd want it to cover. Same goes for savings, you don't save enough for old age and emergencies. Basically if at some point you would have had to do something to prepare for the future, you didn't do it.

The short version about insurance is this: Never insure anything where you can go "damn it" and pay in cash, the same rule goes for deductibles. On the reverse, insure anything that you absolutely have to pay for and would financially ruin you. Some possible areas are your house, liability insurance and health care cost. Google "necessary insurance" or similar.

The short version about savings retirement plans is this: Use google to find out if your government provides sufficient provisions for retirement, if you plan on retiring at all. If not, look for ways to provide for old age and/or invest money, the sooner you start, the better. Hold about three months worth of living expenses in the most liquid form possible to cover emergencies. To ensure saving, order your bank to transfer a set amount of cash every month to a seperate bank account which you can not access on the go.

Thing is, with almost everything in software, one of the first things it gets applied to is... software development.

Whenever some neat tool/algorithm comes out to make analysis of code easier it gets integrated into software development tools, into languages and into libraries.

If the complexity of software stayed static then programmers would have insanely easy jobs now but the demands grow to the point where the actual percent of failed software projects stays pretty static and has done since software development became a reasonably common job.

Programmers essentially become experts in dealing with hideous complex systems involving layers within layers of abstraction. Every few months we watch news reports about how xyz tool is going to make programmers obsolete by allowing "anyone" to create xyz and 10 years later we're getting paid to untangle the mess made by "anyone" who did indeed make xyz... badly while we were using professional equivalents of the same tools to build systems orders of magnitude larger and more complex.

If you had a near human level AI, odds are, everything that could be programmed into it at the start to help it with software development is already going to be part of the suites of tools for helping normal human programmers.

Add to that, there's nothing like working with the code for (as opposed to simply using or watching movies about) real existing modern AI to convince you that we're a long long way from any AI that's anything but an ultra-idiot savant.

And nothing like working in industry to make you realize that an ultra-idiot savant is utterly acceptable and useful.

Side note: I keep seeing a bizarre assumption (which I can only assume is a Hollywood trope) from a lot of people here that even a merely human-level AI would automatically be awesome at dealing with software just because they're made of software. (like how humans are automatically experts in advanced genetic engineering just because we're made of DNA)

Re: recursive self improvement, the crux is whether improvements in AI gets harder the deeper you go. There's not really good units for this.

but lets go with IQ. lets imagine that you start out with an AI like an average human. IQ 100.

If it's trivial to increase intelligence and it doesn't get harder to improve further as you get higher then ya, foom, IQ of 10,000 in no time.

If each IQ point gets exponentially harder to add then while it may have taken a day to go from 100 to 101, by the time it gets to 200 it's having to spend months scanning it's own code for optimizations and experimenting with cut-down versions of itself in order to get to 201.

Given the utterly glacial pace of AI research it doesn't seem like the former is likely.

Perhaps you meant hydrocarbons instead of carbohydrates.

A question for specialists on EA.

If I live in a place where I can choose between a standard mix of electricity sources consisting of hydrocarbons, nuclear and renewables, and a "green" mix of renewables exclusively that costs more, should I buy the green mix or buy the cheaper/cheapest mix and donate the difference to GiveWell?

It might be worth reading through some of the stuff by 80,000 Hours re jobs, internships, etc. Apologies for spam if you already know of them. :)

Hooray! Счастливого Нового года вам, и пусть у вас все получится. If you ever feel like you don't get enough exercise in Russian, just drop a line to me or any other Russian speaker here.maybe the are Spaniards around, too-who knows?..

In case LWers are wondering why MIRI didn't post to LW about its own fundraising drive, that's because we already finished it.

Also, if your employer does corporate matching (check here) and you haven't used it all up yet and you'd like to donate to CFAR, remember to do so before January 1st so that your corporate matching for 2014 doesn't go unused!

I am not completely sold on effective altruism and might also donate to the Red Cross or so.

Interesting, why is this? Do you mean effective altruism as a concept, or the EA movement as it currently is?