Earning money with/​for work in AI safety

(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:

  • Continue full-time research and get paid/​funded by someone.

  • Continue research part-time and work the other part of the time in order to get money. This work would most likely be programming (since I like it and am good at it). I would prefer work that helps humanity effectively.

  • Work full-time on something that helps humanity effectively.


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.)