Wiki Interview With Eliezer/QuestionList

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/The Singularity

1. About the definition of the Singularity.
2. What do you mean by "Hard Takeoff"? How does this relate to your AI work?
3. About the nearness of the Singularity.
4. About the quote "I must warn my reader that my first allegiance is to the Singularity, not humanity."
5. Why is Friendly seed AI the "best" way to achieve the Singularity?
6. About AI or "AI agents" distributed through the Internet.
7. Is there likely to be something unexpected which makes the Singularity unachievable?
8. Do you believe transhuman autonomous intelligence represents a real discontinuity? If so, why?
9. About the target date for achieving the Singularity.
10. Do you consider the Singularity to be a developmental process, or a possible future-state event?
11. Do you consider the Singularity to be a highly predetermined developmental event?
12. Do you recognize the clear directional development of increasing complexity?
13. Do you believe teleological arguments are for the most part irrelevant to achieving a desired future state?
14. Why should we try to achieve the safest possible Singularity as quickly as possible?
15. What do you mean by "an extreme of human intelligence"?
16. Why is achieving the Singularity more important than X?
17. About Nick Bostrom's quote about the unpredictability of the Singularity.
18. About Nick Bostrom's quote about knowing what superintelligences will do.
19. About Nick Bostrom's quote about superinteligences having the same values as their creators.
20. About declaring the Singularity as the Interim Meaning of Life.
21. About post-Singularity entities realizing that the Singularity was a bad idea.
22. About Max More's quote about the Singularity being slower than Vinge suggests.

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/General Information

1. Please describe, in as much detail as willing, a normal day for you.
2. Is your formulated Interim Meaning of Life still valid? What is its relevance to SIAI's work?
3. What four questions do you need answered, and why?
4. What problems are you presently seeking answers for?
5. What needs to be known to safely achieve the Singularity?
6. Why do you consider working towards the achievement of the Singularity to be an act of altruism?
7. What presently suggests to you that there is such a thing as a "moral frame of reference" for humanity?
8. Do Gandhi, Gautama, King, and Gyatso represent to you the "heart" of humanity?
9. About the value of prediction compared to the value of action.
10. What should be our present goal(s), and why?
11. Please state or express your philosophy and understanding in a few sentences.

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Donations And Funding

1. Why should someone donate to SIAI?
2. What benefits do you provide to donors?
3. What type of donations will SIAI accept?
4. About getting funding for SIAI from a technomillionaire.
5. Is the Singularity Institute presently a shoestring operation?
6. To date, how much funding have you received?
7. What type of efforts have been made to acquire funding?
8. Have you applied or are you waiting to apply the funding you have already received?
9. Please state some of the specifications you're seeking in an Executive Director.
10. Why should someone fund the Singularity Institute's AI work instead of other AI work?
11. What commercial or philanthropic benefits could be achieved while achieving the Singularity?
12. What projects would SIAI presently like to initiate, and how much funding will be required?
13. Do you have a time estimate when you will have an AI capable of achieving an impressive demo?
14. What other secondary projects would you like to initiate once the appropriate level of funding is achieved?
15. How would SIAI spend $10K? $100K? $500K? $1M? $10M? $100M? $1B? Please provide approx. spending uses.
16. Why has the Institute had difficulty achieving the mandatory level of funding to initiate their next project(s)?
17. Does SIAI currently have any concentrated recruiting or fundraising efforts in place?
18. Could you elaborate on what kind of volunteer structure you have in mind? Any models for references?
19. What would a Volunteer Coordinator do?
20. About obtaining funds through organized meme-spreading.
21. What is SIAI's present policy on allowing an individual or group access to its non-published work?
22. If a potential donor wanted access to your AI design, would he or she be required to sign a NDA?

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/The Singularity Institute

1. What are the present approximate short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals of the Singularity Institute?
2. Why is SIAI interested in hiring an Executive Director? What type of qualifications are you seeking?
3. What type of involvement does Brian and Sabine Atkins have in promoting the Institute and its goals?

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Autonomous Intelligence

1. Please tell me about the "power of intelligence" and its relevance to our world.
2. Why can General Intelligence in principle be created? What are your assumptions?
3. Why do you believe that General Intelligence can be created in computers?
4. Why is greater-than-human intelligence highly probable? If we have other alternatives, what are they, and why?
5. Why do you believe we can successfully develop the required level of General Intelligence to achieve seed AI? Please describe your present estimation of how difficult this project will be and what will be mandatory. What do you believe will constitute the required level of General Intelligence?
6. What are the qualitative and quantitative aspects of General Intelligence?
7. Please elaborate on other qualitative aspects of General Intelligence.
8. Please describe the functionality and capabilities of a Human-Similar General Intelligence and a human-equivalent General Intelligence.
9. Why do you believe that our minds will have more success, in the short run, at creating a Human-Similar or human-surpassing (i.e., transhuman) autonomous intelligence than any other method, such as increasing autonomous complexity through increasingly advanced forms of evolvable hardware?
10. Why is the Institute using a modified top-down method for AI development instead of a bottom-up developmental and evolutionary method? Please provide the reasoning behind the Institute's chosen strategy.
11. About "Developmental Singularity Studies Resources".
12. About "Self-Organizing and Self-Replicating Paths to Autonomous Intelligence".
13. About "Exploring the Technological Singularity: Uncovering the Universal Drivers of Accelerating Change".
14. Why will the Institute have success developing General Intelligence using a rational engineering method, when all previous AI projects have failed to achieve real AI?
15. You previously claimed that no one project could code a "true mind", but now believe that one project, SIAI's, should be able to code a system with enough General Intelligence for it to begin achieving significant Recursive Self-Improvement. Please elaborate on why you've changed your mind.
16. Based upon your present understanding of Cognitive Science, General Intelligence, goal-oriented cognition, programming, morality and ethics et al., what type of transhuman autonomous intelligence do you foresee existing?
17. What bottlenecks do you expect or not expect to occur as the AI progresses towards near-human-level intelligence? What is your probability estimate that "surprises" will occur as the AI progresses towards near-human-level intelligence?

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Ethics And Friendliness

1. What is the difference between friendliness and Friendliness?
2. Do you believe that a Friendly seed AI will be in many ways superior to an uploaded altruistic human? If so, please elaborate.
3. What would constitute "superiority" in this context?
4. What's the estimated difference between a friendly transhuman and a Friendly transhuman?
5. Is attempting to create a Friendly transhuman AI the most important goal? If so, why?
6. Do you believe SIAI's Friendliness architecture will be "sufficient" at near-human-level AI? If so, why? What about transhuman-level AI?
7. How big do you presently believe that "if" is?
8. About Eugene Leitl's concern and opposition to SIAI's proposed Friendliness architecture.
9. About the arbitrarily large negative consequences of failure in Friendly AI.
10. Why do you believe things are so simple as the dichotomy you've expressed between the two attractors?
11. About the philosophical completeness of causal validity semantics.
12. What is your present probability of superintelligence being friendly, and why?
13. Please elaborate on what you mean by the "inscrutability about the Singularity" not being necessarily good or bad.

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Cognitive Science

1. Why is studying, understanding, and advancing Cognitive Science, such as cognitive neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology, more important than doing the equivalent in subfields of AI? Why is Cognitive Science research so important to the success of AI?
2. What open questions in Cognitive Science have strong relevance to your potential success of engineering General Intelligence?
3. You have written, "The Prime Directive of Artificial Intelligence: Never lie to an AI, and never attempt to control it except with truthful logic." Is this still valid circa 2002? Why or why not? Why will we able to "control" AI with "truthful logic"?

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Issues Of Concern

1. Are you concerned with the possibility of strict regulation on AI? If so, why?
2. Does the possibility of a call for relinquishment on AI development, as has been done with cloning, affect your present-day decisions and actions?
3. If you believe regulation of AI in the future represents catastrophe for us, then what do you propose is done to prevent said regulation?
4. Do you believe it will be a more negative or positive net-effect on SIAI's efforts when millions of people have knowledge of the singularity and related concepts?
5. Do any individuals or groups presently represent implicit or explicit opposition towards the achievement of the Singularity? If so, please elaborate.
6. Specifically, why do Leon Kass and Bill Joy represent implicit opposition to the achievement of the Singularity?
7. About the risk of nanotechnology.
8. About Bill Joy's and John Smart's arguments about why nanotechnology isn't a threat.
9. About intelligence as the only practical way to prevent global catastrophes.
10. About why our metastable species has only two stable attractors, superintelligence and extinction.

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Singularitarian Philosophy

1. What stage of development is the singularitarian philosophy presently in?
2. What needs to be or should be done to improve singularitarianism?
3. In your estimate, how many singularitarians presently exist?
4. Why do you and singularitarians in general believe the Singularity is a "good thing"?
5. What do you mean by "good"?
6. Why do you believe the Singularity is desirable?
7. About "Shiva-Singularities".
8. What are some reasons why ultratechnology is moral?
9. Do you believe "getting smarter" is a primary moral reason?

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Software

1. What is the Flare Programming Language Project and why did SIAI initiate it?
2. What is the Flare project's present status?
3. What are some of the reasons why a programmer would or should be interested in Flare?
4. Why are present software tools inadequate for developing real AI? Why do you believe Flare will help alleviate this situation?
5. What are the estimated short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals of the Flare Project?
6. What programming language will SIAI use in the early stages of AI development, and why?
7. In the context of programming a near-human level General Intelligence, what is your response to the difficulties of developing complex software because of issues of brittleness and unwieldiness?

Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Support

1. If an individual is interested in being on the Singularity Institute's AI development team, what knowledge and understanding should that individual have all ready acquired? What fields should be studied? What important books and papers should be read?
2. Why do you consider those to be key topics?
3. To help achieve SIAI's short-term and mid-term goals, what kind of activity and support is needed?
4. Has SIAI's work garnered interest from academic or business research and development? If not, what do you think is needed to change the situation?