[singularity] AGI funding: US versus China

[Ben Goertzel]

Hi,

As a contrast to this discussion on why AGI is hard to fund in the US, I note that Hugo de Garis has recently relocated to China, where he was given a professorship and immediately given the "use" of basically as many expert programmers/researchers as he can handle.

Furthermore, I have strong reason to believe I could secure a similar position with very little effort...

So, if I just decided to relocate the Novamente project to China, all of a sudden I could have a couple dozen AI scientists fully funded to work on the project.  Very simple: no more trying to convince investors or government funding agencies, no more need to do narrow-AI consulting to make $$ to feed AGI programmers, etc.

I point this out to indicate that the difficulty of funding AGI develoment  is NOT some kind of inevitability related to the perceived speculative nature of the work -- it is a consequence of the way our own society and economy is structured, and the specific cultural history of the US and Europe.

To be honest, I have been mulling over this China possibility a fair bit lately, but am  held back from taking the leap and relocating to China by a couple factors:

1) my primary narrow-AI project, in the financial domain, appears at the moment to have nontrivial odds of making me wealthy enough to fund Novamente development myself, within a couple years

2) I share custody of my kids 50-50 with my ex-wife who lives in Maryland, and doing shared custody from China would be trickier...

Then of course there are various IP and AGI safety issues related to the Chinese government, but I'd rather not go into those at the moment ;-)

But it is quite interesting to reflect that, simply by relocating physically to a different part of the planet and taking a job at a university there, these funding issues would effectively VANISH all at once, as they have for Hugo de Garis.  All of a sudden, within say 6 months of my relocation, Novamente could start progressing toward powerful AGI at five times its current speed.

Because, Chinese society right now is willing to take risks on AGI development that is perceived as speculative, whereas with rare exceptions, US and European society are not.

-- Ben G

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