Finally, it’s hard to make an AGI if the rest of humanity thinks you’re a supervillain, and anyone making an AGI based on a value system other than CEV most certainly is, so you’re better off being the sort of researcher who would incorporate all humanity’s values than the sort of researcher who wouldn’t.
Good point. But that can only work if your research is transparent. Otherwise, why would one believe you are not just signaling this attitude while secretly pursuing your selfish goals? That is the reason why governments get the complete source code of software products from companies like Microsoft.
In the context of machine intelligence, I reckon that means open-source software.
I figure, if you try and keep your source code secret, only fools will trust you. More to the point, competing organisations—who are more willing to actually share their results—are likely to gain mindshare, snowball, and succeed first.
Of course, it doesn’t always work like that. There’s a lot of secret sauce out there—especially server-side. However, for ethical coders, this seems like a no-brainer to me.
Good point. But that can only work if your research is transparent. Otherwise, why would one believe you are not just signaling this attitude while secretly pursuing your selfish goals? That is the reason why governments get the complete source code of software products from companies like Microsoft.
In the context of machine intelligence, I reckon that means open-source software.
I figure, if you try and keep your source code secret, only fools will trust you. More to the point, competing organisations—who are more willing to actually share their results—are likely to gain mindshare, snowball, and succeed first.
Of course, it doesn’t always work like that. There’s a lot of secret sauce out there—especially server-side. However, for ethical coders, this seems like a no-brainer to me.
Are you claiming that it is intrinsically unethical to have closed-source code?
No. Keeping secrets is not normally considered to be “unethical”—but it is a different goal from trying to do something good.