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.

Has anyone here ever tried to contribute to the OpenCog project?

Because I have.

You know what I learned?

This open source* code is missing huge components that are proprietary parts of Ben's Novamente system. So if you're a coder, you can't actually compile it, run it, or do anything with else with it. Ben's holding all the key components hostage and refuses to release them until he's paid money. If you'd like to pay someone a second time to open source the code they already wrote, OpenCog is an excellent charity. Hopefully after he gets enough money to actually show us what he written, Ben's software will cause an amazing Singularity with ponies for everyone. I guess proprietary software can't create Singularities... or ponies.... or funding.

Open Source = closed source components you can't have + empty stubs of code

Yeah, you've tried to contribute huh? Who are you again and why is there no mention of you in my complete archive of the OpenCog mailing lists?

0nilg15y

Louie where did you get this non sense? OpenCog doesn't need any proprietary add-ons and is better and cleaner (and keeps getting better and better) than the Novamente code from which it has been seeded. You are either hiding your identity or making up the fact that you've tried to contribute because I've never heard about you on the email list or IRC.

5Mitchell_Porter15y

Are you saying that the existing OpenCog source is actually useless unless you have a paid-for copy of Novamente to augment it, or just that there are functionalities which have already been realized in Novamente which will have to be recreated in open source if they are to become part of what OpenCog can do?

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