Ben Goertzel on Charity

XiXiDu

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.

Ah, OK. Thanks for clearing that up. Sorry for my perhaps harsh tone, I didn't imagine your comment would be based on an old/incomplete version of OpenCog, you should have mentioned that in your post or even better update your knowledge before posting! There's been a lot of work since then.

You can use it to run a virtual pet under Multiverse (although you need either 2 machines or a virtual box, one with Linux and the other one with Windows because OpenCog isn't completely ported for Windows and Multiverse runs under Windows). It is also used to control the Nao robot in a lab in China. Soon it will be possible to connect it in the Unity3D game engine with a much improved tool kit to code you own bot (because currently the API is really tough to understand and use).

Just for playing around with the various components (except MOSES which is a standalone executable for now) there is a Scheme binding, and there will be soon a Python binding.

It's really a lot of work and except the HK team who got a grant to focus entirely on it for the next 2 years and some students in the BLISS lab in China we only manage to contribute via loosely related contracts that do not always help advancing OpenCog itself (though we're trying our best to direct our efforts toward it).

So any help is very welcome!

http://wiki.opencog.org/w/Volunteer http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project