I just realized that my 'Interests' list on The Facebook made an okay ad hoc list of fields potentially related to Friendliness-like philosophy. They sorta kinda flow into each other by relatedness and are not particularly prioritized. This is my own incomplete list, though it was largely inspired by many conversations with Singularity Institute folk. Plus signs mean I'm moderately more certain that the existing field (or some rationalist re-interpretation of it) has useful insights.
However I don't suggest you start hacking away at these fields until you have at least one sound ontology from which you can bootstrap by adding concepts in a coherent fashion (without becoming attached to that ontology or implicit metaontology). Unfortunately, this branch of rationality has not been discussed much on Less Wrong. In the meantime, just reading a huge effing amount of diverse material and looking for interesting connections and patterns is probably the next best bet, though I'm not really sure. Reading the Wikipedia articles on all of the above fields seems like a decent place to start, though I give no assurance of quality.
As far as I know, nobody in the world is making a systematic effort to do Friendliness philosophy; though some have at least started to ask some fundamental questions. What is a preference? What is a decision? What is reality? We do not yet know how to get an AI to do that kind of philosophy for us, nor how to give the AI metaphilosophy. Meanwhile, none of these problems seem like obstacles for those whose accidental aim is uFAI. Just some food for thought.
I just realized that my 'Interests' list on The Facebook made an okay ad hoc list of fields potentially related to Friendliness-like philosophy. They sorta kinda flow into each other by relatedness and are not particularly prioritized. This is my own incomplete list, though it was largely inspired by many conversations with Singularity Institute folk. Plus signs mean I'm moderately more certain that the existing field (or some rationalist re-interpretation of it) has useful insights.
Friendliness philosophy: