Somewhat related, AGI is such an enormously difficult topic, requiring intimate familiarity with so many different fields, that the vast majority of people (and I count myself among them) simply aren't able to contribute effectively to it.
I'd be interested to know if he thinks there are any singularity-related issues that are important to be worked on, but somewhat more accessible, that are more in need of contributions of man-hours rather than genius-level intellect. Is the only way a person of more modest talents can contribute through donations?
Sorry for the bump, but...
Perhaps what we should do is take all our funds and create a school for AI researchers. This would be an investment for the long hall. You and I may not be super geniuses, but I sure think I could raise some super geniuses.
Also, I feel like this topic deserves more than one comment thread.
As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.