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jacob_cannell comments on Building toward a Friendly AI team - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hardly.
Mathematicians publish their work, it is freely available. It doesn't need to be purchased and privately developed.
Engineering builds on conceptual advances and mathematical tools, but typically said tools are developed long before the engineering work begins.
But if you don't have mathematicians on your team, you might never realize the importance of the work that the other mathematicians publish, presuming that you even hear about it.
In the world I live in, results in one field that are actually important in other fields have a funny way of becoming known.
In the world I live in, inventors use and read about math, without the services of some personal conduit to the higher math gods.
Who determines whats important? The actual inventors, period.
The historical example shows that inventors don't have this problem. Perhaps you believe otherwise, that invention has proceeded sub-optimally to date and would have been faster if only mathematicians and their ideas had more status. I don't see evidence for this.
Actually I see evidence that our society tends to overrate the historical contributions of mathematicians to technical inventions.
Also, like I said in the other thread, it depends what one means by math.
LW-folk in particular (and perhaps lukeprog in extra particular), appear to have an especially strange mathematician fetish.
This is often true in the regular circumstances, but SI is clearly in a rush to avert the x-risk from UFAI, and the relevant math is apparently not yet available, so they have to develop it as they go along. I would compare it to theoretical physics, where available math is often a limiting factor in constructing better models.
This is actually a really interesting and potentially apt comparison. FAI may end up being something like String theory: a region in math space that has zero practical applications. (but given the published work in FAI to date, String Theorists may take offense at such a comparison)
Earlier I said:
SI's conception of 'FAI' as math (whatever that means) is competing with the growing number of pragmatic mainstream approaches, most of which are loosely brain inspired. Humans have internal mechanisms for empathy and altruism which could be reverse engineered and magnified in machines.
But it all depends on what one means by "math". If you count algorithms as new math, then the vast numbers of computer scientists and programmers, and most of the folks working on AGI designs, are thus mathematicians. If by "math", you mean the stuff that academic mathematicians typically work on, then one is hard pressed to find any connection to AGI (friendly or not).