If you're not proposing a better scheme for collaboration, and you criticize my scheme in a non-constructive way, then effectively you're just saying that you're not interested in collaborating at all. And that's kind of sad, given that we're still so far from AGI.
YKY, I think there are two "better schemes" for collaboration than the one you've proposed: -- the traditional for-profit company with equity and options based compensation determined by a committee of trusted individuals -- the open-source project and various combinations thereof... I am interested in innovative organizational structures, and I appreciate your efforts brainstorming in this regard, but I don't really think you've yet come up with anything as good as the more traditional approaches, let alone better. I'm aware that OSS has worked better than most people thought it would beforehand though -- so that skeptical predictions about new forms of organization can certainly be proved wrong! But still I gotta call it as I see it... What Mark W has suggested seems less innovative than what you're grasping toward, but more clearly workable (excepting possible taxation issues). He wants to basically set aside a huge pool of shares in his company to be allocated at a much later date based on retrospectively determined technical/scientific contributions. I see no fundamental problem with this, except that it requires a LOT of trust in the part of the participants in the "trusted managers." And as pointed out it may alienate potential investors. I think Eliezer's point is partly the simple one that if we create an AGI that launches the Singularity, this is a hell of a lot more interesting and important than who gets how much money or how much status for playing a role in creating it. In the context of creating a Singularity-enabling AGI, **control** is a lot more important and interesting an aspect than financial or social credit. On the other hand, if one creates an AGI that does not launch a Singularity but does interesting sub-Singularity-level stuff, then credit of various sorts may of course be valuable. And in some AGI projects, in the early stages, it may not be entirely clear whether the project really has Singularity potential or just valuable-sub-Singularity-AGI potential. -- Ben G ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
