On 6/13/07, Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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. I think you've done a very nice re-cap of what we've said so far, thanks. The problem is that right now I'm not joining Novamente because I have some different AGI ideas that you may not be willing to accept. And I don't blame you for that. If I were to join NM, I'd like to make significant modifications to it, or at least branch out from yours and to explore my favorite ideas. And that, in the context of a conventional company, with the accountability to investors, etc, is just very unfeasible. Therefore I'm NOT blaming you. [ In fact I'm very grateful that you've given me a lot of opportunities even though I'm a nobody, but this is personal. ] Yet if I were to join NM using mostly your AGI ideas, I'd feel very unhappy and also feel that I'm not doing my best. That why I'm trying to find a way out of this. You may find my ideas naive, but there's also inflexibility on your part. You may think you're just doing your business and you don't need to care about an external person pesting you, but that's not optimal. A business is always operating within a business landscape with other competitors. It is really the job of a leader to deal with that landscape as a whole, not just the company itself. In other words, if you cannot efficiently organize the "people", then those who cannot find a place in your company, like me, would end up being your competitors, simply because they have nothing better to do. And that's a senseless waste of resource, among other things. We're still brainstorming I guess... YKY ----- 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
