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lukeprog comments on The Urgent Meta-Ethics of Friendly Artificial Intelligence - Less Wrong
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Awesome. Now your reaction here makes complete sense to me. The way I worded my original article above looks very much like I'm in either the 1st category or the 4th category.
Let me, then, be very clear:
I do not want to raise questions so that I can make a living endlessly re-examining philosophical questions without arriving at answers.
I want me, and rationalists in general, to work aggressively enough on these problems so that we have answers by the time AI+ arrives. As for the fact that I don't have answers yet, please remember that I was a fundamentalist Christian 3 years ago, with no rationality training at all, and a horrendous science education. And I didn't discover the urgency of these problems until about 6 months ago. I've have had to make extremely rapid progress from that point to where I am today. If I can arrange to work on these problems full time, I think I can make valuable contributions to the project of dealing safely with Friendly AI. But if that doesn't happen, well, I hope to at least enable others who can work on this problem full time, like yourself.
I want to solve these problems in 15 years, not 20. This will make most academic philosophers, and most people in general, snort the water they're drinking through their nose. On the other hand, the time it takes to solve a problem expands to meet the time you're given. For many philosophers, the time we have to answer the questions is... billions of years. For me, and people like me, it's a few decades.
I should add that I don't think I will have meta-ethical solutions in 15 years, significantly because I'm not optimistic that I can get someone pay my living expenses while I do 15 years of research. (Why should they? I haven't proven my abilities.) But I think these problems are answerable, and that we are in a fantastic position to answer them if we want to do so. We know an awful lot about physics, psychology, logic, neuroscience, AI, and so on. Even experts that were active 15 years before now did not have all these advantages. More importantly, most thinkers today do not even take advantage of them.
Have you considered applying to the SIAI Visiting Fellows program? It could be worth a month or 3 of having your living expenses taken care of while you research, and could lead to something longer term.
Seconding JGWeissman — you'd probably be accepted as a Visiting Fellow in an instant, and if you turn out to be sufficiently good at the kind of research and thinking that they need to have done, maybe you could join them as a paid researcher.