An assumption of mine that can be debated perhaps in a
separate message thread, is that there should be
effectively only one AGI, allowing for a federation of
AGI's contrived to prevent war between them.
I've explained my opinion of the various "AI conquer the world" memes before, this probably isn't the thread for a repeat :) However, I think there might be something to be said for this idea for a completely different reason.
OpenOffice works well under the GPL because of what it does: everyone puts their own little OpenOffice installation on their own PC and uses it for individual-scale tasks, and the GPL lets them do this.
Google wouldn't work at all well under the GPL. Why? Because if everyone had their own little Google, it would be quite useless [1]. The system's usefulness comes from the fact that there is only one Google, and it is _big_, in terms of both knowledge and the computing resources to use that knowledge.
A serious AGI will have to end up making Google look like those '10 PRINT "HELLO": GOTO 10' programs we used to write on our childhood 8-bit computers. If everyone just downloads their own copy and tweaks it separately from everyone else's, the sum total of value generated will be effectively zero.
Now, I don't think I'd have the license say "you must donate CPU cycles in payment for using this" both because I don't see any way to enforce it and because it would justifiably annoy people who want to e.g. play with it on a laptop without an Internet connection.
What I would consider doing (haven't thought very much about this so far, might be flaws in the idea, but I think it's at least worth a look) if I were going to do open source AGI, is take an idea from GPL and say: You may do anything you like with this on your own PC, but you may not _distribute_ an incompatible version. Any modified version that gets distributed, must seamlessly hook into the network of other copies.
[1] I know there are some companies that have licensed Google to catalog their intranet stuff, but this is small change by comparison, and even this doesn't apply to AGI because the latter's knowledge acquisition will be far less regular and at least for the foreseeable future far less fully automatable than Google's.
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
