Re: Singularity Objections: SIAI, General Objections

From: Joshua Fox (joshua@joshuafox.com)
Date: Fri Feb 01 2008 - 06:59:02 MST


Joshua Fox wrote:
> > a number of good projects which SIAI can invest a lot more money in.
Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> Name five.

Now _that's_ fun!

Here's some brainstorming. An asterisk marks projects which I found on
intelligence.org.

* Research grants on all levels
- With a boatload of money: Much wider support of university research,
including funding professorial chairs. [Comment: Good and intelligent people
may follow the money, and the best can be chosen. Even if they are not on
the level described in the SIAI's researcher job-description, they can still
contribute smaller pieces of the FAI solution. Feynman et al. didn't choose
the goals of the Manhattan project, yet did stellar work once recruited.]
- Undergraduate/graduate tuition fellowships
- Research prizes a la X-Prize for major milestones
- Prizes for smaller accomplishments, like for best essay explaining FAI
targeted at a popular audience, or at specific scientific audiences; best
student essay on FAI; best scientific article making some progress, even
minor, on FAI
* Professional-quality slideshow
- Other high-quality publicity materials, whether web, print, video, or
lecture tours. These can be directed to various purposes, including
convincing university students and cog-sci researchers to explore and adopt
a new paradigm; or Silicon Valley millionaires to form a self-reinforcing
donor community.
- Research and preparation for handling public relations, whether to garner
support or to counter-act future political meddling.
* More Singularity Summits
- Scientific workshops, seminars, and conferences
* OpenCog
- A part-time stipend for team members who now volunteer, or a full-time
stipend to team members who are now part-time, to allow them to devote more
of their time to SIAI
* More in-house research fellows
- A good professional fund-raiser
* An endowment. Harvard has $35 billion in the bank; SIAI can start catching
up!
- SIAI can build an in-house dev team once the research has prepared the
ground for FAI development. Even before then, it may be useful: Researchers
often hire developers to build software for experimentation with parts of
a theory.
- Once SIAI gets the aforementioned boatload of money, perhaps it can
sponsor Novamente, which seems like the most likely dev team for FAI.
Depending on legalities and the desires of Novamente stockholders, SIAI
could invest in Novamente or hire on the whole team.

I'm rooting for you!

Joshua



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:01 MDT