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.

I feel that people here are way too emotional. If you tell them they'll link you up to a sequence post on why being emotional can be a good thing. I feel that people here are not skeptic enough. If you tell them they'll link you up to a sequence post on why being skeptic can be a bad thing. I feel that people here take some possibilities too seriously. If you tell them they'll link you up...and so on. I could as well be talking to Yudkowsky only. And whether there is someone else, some expert or otherwise smart guy not agreeing then he is either accused of not having read the sequences or below their standards.

Eliezer believes that building a superhuman intelligence is so dangerous that experimenting with it is irresponsible...

The whole 'too dangerous' argument is perfect for everything from not having to prove any coding or engineering skills to dismissing openness and any kind of transparency up to things I am not even allowed to talk about here.

If he's wrong, then he'll fail, and SIAI will fail. If someone else has a different, viable, strategy, then that group will succeed. If nobody does, then nobody will.

Here we get to the problem. I have no good arguments against all of what I have hinted at above except that I have a strong gut feeling that something is wrong. So I'm trying to poke holes into it, I try to crumble the facade. Why? Well, they are causing me distress by telling me all those things about how possible galactic civilizations depend on my and your money. They are creating ethical dilemmas that make me feel committed to do something even though I'd really want to do something else. But before I do that I'll first have to see if it holds water.

But Eliezer has written tens of thousands of words introducing his strategy and his reasons for finding it compelling...

Yup, I haven't read most of the sequences but I did a lot spot tests and read what people linked me up to. I have yet to come across something novel. And I feel all that doesn't really matter anyway. The basic argument is that high-risks can outweigh low probabilities, correct? That's basically the whole fortification for why I am supposed to bother, everything else just being a side note. And that is also where I feel (yes gut feeling, no excuses here) something is wrong. I can't judge it yet, maybe in 10 years when I learnt enough math, especially probability. But currently it just sounds wrong. If I thought that there was a low probability that running the LHC was going to open an invasion door for a fleet of aliens interested in torturing mammals then according to the aforementioned line of reasoning I could justify murdering a bunch of LHC scientists to prevent them from running the LHC. Everything else would be scope-insensitivity! Besides the obvious problems with that, I have a strong feeling that that line of reasoning is somehow bogus. I also don't know jack shit about high-energy physics. And I feel Yudkowsky doesn't know jack shit about intelligence (not that anyone else does know more about it). In other words, I feel we need to do more experiments first to understand what 'intelligence' is to ask people for their money to save the universe from paperclip maximizers.

See, I'm just someone who got dragged into something he thinks is bogus and of which he doesn't want to be a part of but who nonetheless feels that he can't ignore it either. So I'm just hoping it goes away if I try hard enough. How wrong and biased, huh? But I'm neither able to ignore it nor get myself to do something about it.

I feel that people here are way too emotional

And you have expressed that feeling most passionately.

1Nornagest15y

Less Wrong ought to be about reasoning, as per Common Interest of Many Causes. Like you (I presume), I would like to see more posts about reasoning and fewer, despite my transhumanist sympathies, about boxed AIs, hypothetical torture scenarios, and the optimality of donating to the Friendly AI cause: focusing our efforts that way is more interesting, more broadly appealing, and ultimately more effective for everyone involved including the SIAI. And I'd hazard a guess that the SIAI representatives here know that. A lot of people benefit from knowing how to think and act more effectively unqualified, but a site about improving reasoning skills that's also an appendage to the SIAI party line limits its own effectiveness, and therefore its usefulness as a way of sharpening reasoning about AI (and, more cynically, as a source of smart and rational recruits), by being exclusionary. We're doing a fair-to-middling job in that respect; we could definitely be doing a better one, if the above is a fair description of the intended topic according to the people who actually call the shots around here. That's fine, and it does deserve further discussion. But the topic of rationality isn't at all well served by flogging criticisms of the SIAI viewpoint that have nothing to do with rationality, especially when they're brought up out of the context of an existing SIAI discussion. Doing so might diminish perceived or actual groupthink re: galactic civilizations and your money, but it still lowers the signal-to-noise ratio, for the simple reason that the appealing qualities of this site are utterly indifferent to the pros and cons of dedicating your money to the Friendly AI cause except insofar as it serves as a case study in rational charity. Granted, there are signaling effects that might counter or overwhelm its usefulness as a case study, but the impression I get from talking to outsiders is that those are far from the most obvious or destructive signaling problems that the comm

9TheOtherDave15y

(nods) I see. So, if you were simply skeptical about Yudkowsky/SIAI, you could dismiss them and walk away. But since you're emotionally involved and feel like you have to make it all go away in order to feel better, that's not an option for you. The problem is, what you're doing isn't going to work for you either. You're just setting yourself up for a rather pointless and bitter conflict. Surely this isn't a unique condition? I mean, there are plenty of groups out there who will tell you that there are various bad things that might happen if you don't read their book, donate to their organization, etc., etc., and you don't feel the emotional need to make them go away. You simply ignore them, or at least most of them. How do you do that? Perhaps you can apply the same techniques here.

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