Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

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I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent.

But, why? Nothing about "AI safety" is remotely useful. It would be like researching "alcohol safety" (something everybody has access to and nobody can restrict) or researching how ants can influence "human safety" (tiny things trying to influence massive things). It's nonsense no matter which way you think about it unless you just want to write SF novels.

Open-source infrastructure.

Sadly, we don't need "research" to study how it works, we need direct payments to contributors. As a "startup culture" we need to stop the trend of billion dollar companies using free open source labor to reduce corporate costs and boost corporate profits while paying highly skilled professional volunteers nothing.

Yudkowsky Ambition

A key part of _research_ is you need to have a plan of attack. Saying "We're going to fund research into antigravity, time travel, and zero point energy" sure sounds like fun, but it's an absolute waste of time.

> boost corporate profits while paying highly skilled professional volunteers nothing.

This is a problem of ancient outdated patent and copyright law, not scientific innovation. Its in the field of politics since the industry is entirely built on state enforced IP legislation.

But open source code is all about "no patent restrictions" and free licensing even with retained copyright (or even outright copyright assignment/dumb CLAs).

Iterating those concepts don't seem to fix the issue of Twitter running 50,000 copies of an application developed by 3 open source volunteer people and not paying those 3 people anything.

The issue is that with copyright and patent law the way it is written software is heavily biased towards proprietary development for profit, by restricting what the user can do with the software they run. It is also an issue of users not caring that they are being given the equivalent of a car with a sealed engine compartment. The average consumer can understand why that is bad, even if they themselves would never open up the engine, because it would mean they could not let their local mechanic fix their car, they would have to submit to the manufacturer at whatever price they want to charge because there is no competition anymore.

They just don't correlate that to proprietary software at all, which is understandable because most people cannot internalize concepts related to information transfer, scarcity, transformation, or preservation. They exist in the real world and more easily relate to the physical and ignore the implications of ignorance in all that is not presented to them in that medium.

That still remains a political problem, one with your system of economics. I guess since YC is funding that UBI research it may also be relevant to research alternatives to US IP law that can optimize for productivity and social utility of the results, because we are obviously not close to a maxima right now.

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