You'll probably want to be either the sort of good at math who regularly leaves "is good at math" people in the dust or be prepared to work quite hard.

At least if you're going by the "AGI is all about math" route. If one takes the "AGI is more about cognitive science and psychology" approach, then they don't necessarily need to be quite that good at math, though a basic competence is still an absolute must.

You could look at the papers published in past AGI conferences for people/topics that seem relevant or worthwhile. E.g. AGI 2013, AGI 2012. There's also a Journal of Artificial General Intelligence whose past issues you could browse.

For something more "mainstream-friendly", there are the various computational cognitive architectures that have been developed in cognitive psychology, such as ACT-R and LIDA. Stan Franklin, one of the people behind LIDA, has also had some involvement with the AGI community.

Am I naive to hope that I can do anything useful and fulfilling (based on the given data) in this area ("strong AI")?

I don't know what the requirements for a Bachelor's thesis at your university are, but at mine, you could do a Bachelor's thesis that was basically just a literature review and didn't even try to produce any new information. Even if you couldn't actually contribute anything new at this point, even taking this opportunity to familiarize yourself with the existing work in the field would probably be useful for your future efforts.

You might want to try to build yourself a T-shaped skillset on the relevant disciplines, based on MIRI's course recommendation list for example. Meaning that you'll try to master one part of the domain well enough that you could eventually do a PhD on it, and have enough awareness on the rest to be reasonably conversant about it.

My impression on that stuff is that if you want to be serious about it, most of it is quite heavy going compared to general STEM undergraduate fare. You'll probably want to be either the sort of good at math who regularly leaves "is good at math" people in the dust or be prepared to work quite hard.

Hello,

I'd like to get some opinions about my future goals.

I'm 21 and I'm a second-year student of engineering in Prague, Czech Republic, focusing mainly on math and then physics.

My background is not stunning - I was born in 93, visiting sporting primary school and then general high school. Until I was in second year of high school, I behaved as an idiot with below-average results in almost everything, paradoxically except extraordinary "general study presupposes" (whatever it means). My not so bad IQ - according to IQ test I took when I was 15 - is about 130 points. When I was 17, I realized that there is something about the world that needs to be done with. I started to study, mainly math and physics. I was horrible at it - I had very big disadvantage because I missed basics and wasn't able to recognize it. Anyway, I tried (but, unfortunately, not as much as I had to) and reached so-so level and I got on the technical university. Here I tried really hard and I achieved relatively good results and got into the best maths-focused student group. I'm below-average in this group (about 30 students) and my results are satisfactory. I'm quite popular thanks to collaborating on some non-study events for my schoolmates. I also created a presentation for high school students about engineering and I distributed it among faculty workers and students, who are connected to propagation.

About 10 years I obtained ECDL and it started my curiosity about informatics. But nothing special - I was autodidact in HTML and "computer administration" for regular usage. I was also very interested in economy, as my father is working in this area. I actively did cross-country skiing and play on piano and trombone.

I have high charisma, authority and ability to organize people and some bigger events, which I was usually asked to prepare (the graduate prom, matriculation etc.). I have good reasoning skills and ability to negotiate even under heavy pressure and stress. People usually enjoy time with me and appreciates me for my honesty, empathy and "cold-think" reasoning solutions, which in most time shows there were the best possible. I'm in healthy relationship for two years. My family is good background for my activities and support me. They also support me financially. My expense per month is not more than 300 USD including accommodation with in an apartment (university students, two of them from my university and domain), food and social activities.

Currently, apart from my school activities, I'm also attending some kind of philosophy group every week, where we usually discuss some topic about epistemology, relationships, culture, religions etc., we read some philosophic works (Platon), deal with art (classical music or paintings) or we write some kind of voluntary essays. I'm really interested in discussions about these topics and I try to develop my reasoning skills as often I can. For example, now I contacted a priest from local temple with whom I want to discuss some religion based questions. I autodidact psychology (last book I've read was Kahneman: Think fast and slow), rationality (started to read LW sequences), and programming. I enjoy using open source software on my Archlinux laptop and now I dived into Python as a scripting language. I also develop some web for my mother using Django and I also signed for a statistical research task about datamining in Python (pandas, numpy, scikit-learn...) or R. In school I have courses of C++ also. I'm not the most talented or generally best mathematician or programmer, but I have quite good learning (and also teaching) skills.

I've chosen my "path" - I'd like to do what's right and true and seek for the truth whenever it is possible. I feel that I'm not getting everything (e.g. from my school) I need for changing the world to a better place. I could do more. I can't decide where to focus and how to divide my attention and possibilities. Should I do aggressive autodidact of sequences? Should I focus on maths and algorithms or biases? Should I try to develop my social skills?

And the second question is simple:" Are there any Czechs who are interested in meetups in PRAGUE?"

Thank you