Eliezer has not positioned himself to be the hero, the one who writes the AI or implements its utility function
I disagree based on the following evidence:
After all, if you had the complete decision process, you could run it as an AI, and I'd be coding it up right now. (Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2009 06:19:28PM)
You further write:
If the hero/AI programmer comes to him with a seed AI, then he knows it exists, and finding out that a seed AI exists before it launches is the hardest part of any plan to steal it and rewrite its utility function to conquer the universe.
I'm not aware of any reason to believe that recursively self-improving artificial general intelligence is going to be something you can 'run away with'. It looks like some people here think so, that there will be some kind of, with hindsight, simple algorithm for intelligence that people can just run and get superhuman intelligence. Indeed, transparency could be very dangerous in that case. But that doesn't mean it is an all or nothing decision. There are many other reasons for transparency, including reassurance and the ability to discern a trickster or impotent individual from someone who deserves more money. But as I said, I don't see that anyway. It'll more likely be a blue sheet of different achievements that are each not dangerous on their own. I further think it will be not just a software solution but also a conceptual and computational revolution. In those cases an open approach will allow public oversight. And even if someone is going to run with it, you want them to use your solution rather than one that will most certainly be unfriendly.
Earlier, I lamented that even though Eliezer named scholarship as one of the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, there is surprisingly little interest in (or citing of) the academic literature on some of Less Wrong's central discussion topics.
Previously, I provided an overview of formal epistemology, that field of philosophy that deals with (1) mathematically formalizing concepts related to induction, belief, choice, and action, and (2) arguing about the foundations of probability, statistics, game theory, decision theory, and algorithmic learning theory.
Now, I've written Machine Ethics is the Future, an introduction to machine ethics, the academic field that studies the problem of how to design artificial moral agents that act ethically (along with a few related problems). There, you will find PDFs of a dozen papers on the subject.
Enjoy!