I think the basic argument for OpenAI is that it is more dangerous for any one organization or world power to have an exclusive monopoly on A.I. technology, and so OpenAI is an attempt to safeguard against this possibility. Basically, it reduces the probability that someone like Alphabet/Google/Deepmind will establish an unstoppable first mover advantage and use it to dominate everyone else.
OpenAI is not really meant to solve the Friendly/Unfriendly AI problem. Rather it is meant to mitigate the dangers posed by for-profit corporations or nationalistic governments made up of humans doing what humans often do when given absurd amounts of power.
Personally I think OpenAI doesn’t actually solve this problem sufficiently well because they are still based in the United States and thus beholden to U.S. laws, and wish that they’d chosen a different country, because right now the bleeding edge of A.I. technology is being developed primarily in a small region of California, and that just seems like putting all your eggs in one basket.
I do think however that the general idea of having a non-profit organization focused on AI technology is a good one, and better than the alternative of continuing to merely trust Google to not be evil.
That is a hard question to answer, because I’m not a foreign policy expert. I’m a bit biased towards Canada because I live there and we already have a strong A.I. research community in Montreal and around Toronto, but I’ll admit Canada as a middle power in North America is fairly beholden to American interests as well. Alternatively, some reasonably peaceful, stable, and prosperous democratic country like say, Sweden, Japan, or Australia might make a lot of sense.
It may even make some sense to have the headquarters be more a figurehead, and have the company operate as a federated decentralized organization with functionally independent but cooperating branches in various countries. I’d probably avoid establishing such branches in authoritarian states like China or Iran, mostly because such states would have a much easier time arbitrarily taking over control of the branches on a whim, so I’d probably stick to fairly neutral or pacifist democracies that have a good history of respecting the rule of law, both local and international, and which are relatively safe from invasion or undue influence by the great powers of U.S., Russia, and China.
Though maybe an argument can be made to intentionally offset the U.S. monopoly by explicitly setting up shop in another great power like China, but that runs the risks I mentioned earlier.
And I mean, if you could somehow acquire a private ungoverned island in the Pacific or an offshore platform, or an orbital space station or base on the moon or mars, that would be cool too, but I highly doubt that’s logistically an option for the foreseeable future, not to mention it could attract some hostility from the existing world powers.
Figurehead and branches is an interesting idea. If data, code and workers are located all over the world, the organization can probably survive even if one or few branches are taken. Where should the head office be located, and in what form (e.g. holding company, charity)? These type of questions deserve a post, do you happen to know any place to discuss building safe AI research lab from scratch?
I don’t really know enough about business and charity structures and organizations to answer that quite yet. I’m also not really sure where else would be a productive place to discuss these ideas. And I doubt I or anyone else reading this has the real resources to attempt to build a safe AI research lab from scratch that could actually compete with the major organizations like Google, Facebook, or OpenAI, which all have millions to billions of dollars at their disposal, so this is kind of an idle discussion. I’m actually working for a larger tech company now than the startup from before, so for the time being I’ll be kinda busy with that.
I think the basic argument for OpenAI is that it is more dangerous for any one organization or world power to have an exclusive monopoly on A.I. technology, and so OpenAI is an attempt to safeguard against this possibility. Basically, it reduces the probability that someone like Alphabet/Google/Deepmind will establish an unstoppable first mover advantage and use it to dominate everyone else.
OpenAI is not really meant to solve the Friendly/Unfriendly AI problem. Rather it is meant to mitigate the dangers posed by for-profit corporations or nationalistic governments made up of humans doing what humans often do when given absurd amounts of power.
Personally I think OpenAI doesn’t actually solve this problem sufficiently well because they are still based in the United States and thus beholden to U.S. laws, and wish that they’d chosen a different country, because right now the bleeding edge of A.I. technology is being developed primarily in a small region of California, and that just seems like putting all your eggs in one basket.
I do think however that the general idea of having a non-profit organization focused on AI technology is a good one, and better than the alternative of continuing to merely trust Google to not be evil.
If a new non-profit AI research company were to be built from scratch, which regions or countries would be best for the safety of humanity?
That is a hard question to answer, because I’m not a foreign policy expert. I’m a bit biased towards Canada because I live there and we already have a strong A.I. research community in Montreal and around Toronto, but I’ll admit Canada as a middle power in North America is fairly beholden to American interests as well. Alternatively, some reasonably peaceful, stable, and prosperous democratic country like say, Sweden, Japan, or Australia might make a lot of sense.
It may even make some sense to have the headquarters be more a figurehead, and have the company operate as a federated decentralized organization with functionally independent but cooperating branches in various countries. I’d probably avoid establishing such branches in authoritarian states like China or Iran, mostly because such states would have a much easier time arbitrarily taking over control of the branches on a whim, so I’d probably stick to fairly neutral or pacifist democracies that have a good history of respecting the rule of law, both local and international, and which are relatively safe from invasion or undue influence by the great powers of U.S., Russia, and China.
Though maybe an argument can be made to intentionally offset the U.S. monopoly by explicitly setting up shop in another great power like China, but that runs the risks I mentioned earlier.
And I mean, if you could somehow acquire a private ungoverned island in the Pacific or an offshore platform, or an orbital space station or base on the moon or mars, that would be cool too, but I highly doubt that’s logistically an option for the foreseeable future, not to mention it could attract some hostility from the existing world powers.
Figurehead and branches is an interesting idea. If data, code and workers are located all over the world, the organization can probably survive even if one or few branches are taken. Where should the head office be located, and in what form (e.g. holding company, charity)? These type of questions deserve a post, do you happen to know any place to discuss building safe AI research lab from scratch?
I don’t really know enough about business and charity structures and organizations to answer that quite yet. I’m also not really sure where else would be a productive place to discuss these ideas. And I doubt I or anyone else reading this has the real resources to attempt to build a safe AI research lab from scratch that could actually compete with the major organizations like Google, Facebook, or OpenAI, which all have millions to billions of dollars at their disposal, so this is kind of an idle discussion. I’m actually working for a larger tech company now than the startup from before, so for the time being I’ll be kinda busy with that.