208 12 The Engineering and Development of Ethics
rise to questions about the ethical value of various practical modalities of AGI development, for instance:
e Should AGI be developed in a top-secret installation by a select group of individuals selected for a combination of technical and scientific brilliance and moral uprightness, or other qualities deemed relevant (a “closed approach")? Or should it be developed out in the open, in the manner of open-source software projects like Linux? (an "open approach"). The open approach allows the collective intelligence of the world to more fully participate — but also potentially allows the more unsavory elements of the human race to take some of the publicly-developed AGI concepts and tools private, and develop them into AGIs with selfish or evil purposes in mind. Is there some meaningful intermediary between these extremes?
e Should governments regulate AGI, with Friendliness in mind (as advocated carefully by e.g Bill Hibbard [Hib02])? Or will this just cause AGI development to move to the handful of countries with more liberal policies? ... or cause it to move underground, where nobody can see the dangers developing? As a rough analogue, it’s worth noting that the US government’s imposition of restrictions on stem cell research, under President George W. Bush, appears to have directly stimulated the provision of additional funding for stem cell research in other nations like Korea, Singapore and China.
The former issue is, obviously, highly relevant to CogPrime (which is currently being devel- oped via the open source CogPrime project); and so the various dimensions of this issues are worth briefly sketching here.
We have a strong skepticism of selfappointed elite groups that claim (even if they genuinely believe) that they know what’s best for everyone, and a healthy respect for the power of collective intelligence and the Global Brain, which the open approach is ideal for tapping. On the other hand, we also understand the risk of terrorist groups or other malevolent agents forking an open source AGI project and creating something terribly dangerous and destructive. Balancing these factors against each other rigorously, seems beyond the scope of current human science.
Nobody really understands the social dynamics by which open technological knowledge plays out in our current world, let alone hypothetical future scenarios. Right now there exists open knowledge about many very dangerous technologies, and there exist many terrorist groups, yet these groups fortunately make scant use of these technologies. The reasons why appear to be essentially sociological — the people involved in these terrorist groups tend not to be the ones who have mastered the skills of turning public knowledge on cutting-edge technologies into real engineered systems. But while it’s easy to observe this sociological phenomenon, we certainly have no way to estimate its quantitative extent from first principles. We don’t really have a strong understanding of how safe we are right now, given the technology knowledge available right now via the Internet, textbooks, and so forth. Even relatively straightforward issues such as nuclear proliferation remain confusing, even to the experts.
It’s also quite clear that keeping powerful AGI locked up by an elite group doesn’t really provide reliable protection against malevolent human agents. History is rife with such situations going awry, e.g. by the leadership of the group being subverted, or via brute force inflicted by some outside party, or via a member of the elite group defecting to some outside group in the interest of personal power or reward or due to group-internal disagreements, etc. There are many things that can go wrong in such situations, and the confidence of any particular group that they are immune to such issues, cannot be taken very seriously. Clearly, neither the open nor closed approach qualifies as a panacea.
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