Indeed, there are obvious political problems related to doing AGI work in China, and also obvious (but not foolproof) ways to manage them.... But I suppose this is not the most apropos discussion topic for the list...
Ben
On 10/23/06, Josh Treadwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is a big problem. If China was a free nation, I wouldn't have any qualms with it, but the first thing China will do with AGI is marginalize human rights. Any nation who censors it's internet (violators are sent to prisoner/slave camps) and sells organs of unwilling executed prisoners (more are executed each year in china than the entire world combined) is not a place I'd like AGI to be developed. I hope Hugo doesn't regret his decision. You also have to watch out for copyright violation. They're not going to care if your project gets stolen, and if you announce that you're close to finishing your project, I'd have guards posted in the server room. Things could get scary really quickly.
Josh TreadwellBen Goertzel wrote:
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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