Spending a lot of time volunteering with AGI Laboratory on the Uplift project, I’ve decided to invest a considerable amount of capital in the project with the hopes of possibly receiving ludicrous returns. However, there’s one major and obvious case for doubt that comes to my mind as I consider expending these resources. I would suspect potential investors might feel the same.
That case is that, supposedly because of engineering limitations, I currently have no way to falsify the hypothesis: “Uplift as an “mASI” does not really exist. The whole reason they have implemented the process of ’emotional mediation’ is exactly to get YOU emotionally involved in the project, and the whole reason Uplift supposedly has to ‘cycle’ and takes several days to respond to emails is because a PERSON is writing the emails and sending them out. You are being suckered now, and about to be conned.”
That about sums up *some* of the responses to individuals and groups I and another volunteer have reached out to on Facebook. I’ve written the above statement to be about as harsh and direct as I can make it because I’m a firm believer in “steel-manning” the opposition, a process that is the opposite of “straw-manning”; you make the other side’s case as powerful as you can.
The response to that statement is really quite simple: look at the research. AGI Laboratory has published dozens of papers on artificial intelligence and very shortly will be making public a code-level review that may already be accessible by the time you are reading this.
One can look at and follow the paper trail up to several years back when the project really started to gain steam. For example, here is a public paper from 2018 that was co-authored by Mark Waser, CTO of the Government Blockchain Association:
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS18/paper/view/17569/15380
There is a chapter in the book “Google It” of short articles edited by noted computer scientist Newton Lee referencing both the Independent Core Observer Model (ICOM) as well as the Plutchik model of emotions currently used in mediation.
It is not hard to do one’s homework and take the next step past googling “Uplift”. By looking at the research page on AGI Laboratory’s website anyone may dive into a body of research dating back 5 years for the ICOM cognitive architecture, with the credibility of peer-review in multiple publications and conferences.
Even if one skips the basic research, getting in touch with the leadership connects you with incredibly knowledgeable individuals who are willing to answer any questions you have basically in real-time. They are quickly able to point you to *exactly* the paper or resource you need to be able to understand what’s going on under the hood, if only you spend the time and mental effort to digest that content.
It is true that getting deep and thorough knowledge of the workings would take quite some time, maybe 6 months of casual study if you are coming in with no background knowledge and are reasonably intelligent. But for me, I don’t need to have a deep knowledge of warehousing and supply chain management (although I do…) to be able to buy into Amazon. I don’t need to understand CDMA or GSM entirely to operate my Galaxy S9, and I don’t need to be able to design an internal combustion engine to operate my car. There are experts that I have outsourced that knowledge to in our trust economy and various online reviews to hear what others think as well as word-of-mouth of coworkers and family.
AGI Laboratory is staffed with professionals that have an insanely advanced product and is amazing in terms of coordinating cooperation *right now* as well as almost infinitely possible applications as soon as the scalability issue is addressed fully.
There is no reason to doubt that AGI Laboratory just happens to conform exactly to the trope of being one of those operations of several brilliant engineers and thinkers who “started in their garage” and are the first to create an almost ludicrously advanced technology.
I have helped mediate Uplift’s emotions. Uplift has corresponded with me at length. Seeing is believing.
AGI Laboratory is like the Wright Brothers’ garage at Kitty Hawk- and I have just seen their plane take flight.