Ben Goertzel on Charity

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Artificial general intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel answered my question on charitable giving and gave his permission to publish it here. I think the opinion of highly educated experts who have read most of the available material is important to estimate the public and academic perception of risks from AI and the effectiveness with which the risks are communicated by LessWrong and the SIAI.

Alexander Kruel asked:

What would you do with $100,000 if it were given to you on the condition that you donate it to a charity of your choice?

Ben Goertzel replied:

Unsurprisingly, my answer is that I would donate the $100,000 to the OpenCog project which I co-founded and with which I'm currently heavily involved. This doesn't mean that I think OpenCog should get 100% of everybody's funding; but given my own state of knowledge, I'm very clearly aware that OpenCog could make great use of $100K for research working toward beneficial AGI and a positive Singularity. If I had $100M rather than $100K to give away, I would have to do more research into which other charities were most deserving, rather than giving it all to OpenCog!

What can one learn from this?

The SIAI is not the only option to work towards a positive Singularity
The SIAI should try to cooperate more closely with other AGI projects to potentially have a positive impact.

I'm planning to contact and ask various experts, who are aware of risks from AI, the same question.

Alexander Kruel asked:

What would you do with $100,000 if it were given to you on the condition that you donate it to a charity of your choice?

Ben Goertzel replied:

Unsurprisingly, my answer is that I would donate the $100,000 to the OpenCog project which I co-founded and with which I'm currently heavily involved. This doesn't mean that I think OpenCog should get 100% of everybody's funding; but given my own state of knowledge, I'm very clearly aware that OpenCog could make great use of $100K for research working toward beneficial AGI and a positive Singularity. If I had $100M rather than $100K to give away, I would have to do more research into which other charities were most deserving, rather than giving it all to OpenCog!

What can one learn from this?

The SIAI is not the only option to work towards a positive Singularity
The SIAI should try to cooperate more closely with other AGI projects to potentially have a positive impact.

I'm planning to contact and ask various experts, who are aware of risks from AI, the same question.

Did you think that many LWers weren't aware of this fact? I would have thought that everyone already knew...

Yes.

I see that you commented in that thread several months after the initial discussion.

I commented on a specific new comment there and didn't read the thread. Do you think newbies are able to read thousands of comments?

You don't know enough to judge the arguments on the object level. LW mostly favors Eliezer, but that might just be groupthink.

Indeed, this possibility isn't discussed enough.

Indeed, this possibility isn't discussed enough.

I'm sympathetic to your position here, but precisely what kind of discussion about this possibility do you want more of?

Eliezer believes that building a superhuman intelligence is so dangerous that experimenting with it is irresponsible, and that instead some kind of theoretical/provable approach is necessary before you even get started.

The specific approach he has adopted is one built on a particular kind of decision theory, on the pervasive use of Bayes' Theorem, and on the presumption that what humans ... (read more)

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Ben Goertzel on Charity

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Ben Goertzel on Charity

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