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John Carmack Sets Out To Create General AI
John Carmack, programmer extraordinaire, and developer of seminal titles like "Doom" and "Quake" has said "Hasta La Vista" to his colleagues at Oculus to to set out for a new challenge. In a Facebook post (https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/2547632585471243/) he declares that he is going to work on artificial general intelligence.
What are the chances he can pull it off, and what could go wrong?
John Carmack Steps Down at Oculus to Pursue AI Passion Project `Before I get too old'
John Carmack Steps Down at Oculus to Pursue AI Passion Project `Before I get too Old':
Legendary coder John Carmack is leaving Facebook's Oculus after six years to focus on a personal project — no less than the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, or "Strong AI." He'll remain attached to the company in a "Consulting CTO" position, but will be spending all his time working on, perhaps, the AI that finally surpasses and destroys humanity.
AGI or strong AI is the concept of an AI that learns much the way humans do, and as such is not as limited as the extremely narrow machine learning algorithms we refer to as AI today. AGI is the science fiction version of AI — HAL 9000, Replicants and, of course, the Terminator. There are some good ones out there, too — Data and R2-D2, for instance.
[...] Carmack announced the move on Facebook, where he explained that the uncertainty about such a fascinating and exciting topic is exactly what attracted him to it:
When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague "line of sight" to the solutions, even if they were unconventional or unproven. I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn't in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.
Skynet? Singularity? With great power comes great responsibility. Can he do it? Should he?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @06:15PM
In my opinion the secret sauce of individuals like Carmack is not any particular thing, but simply the overall skill set and brain that enables him to do what he does. For instance, imagine Carmack had chosen to pursue e.g. cosmological research instead of software development, I would generally expect he probably would have managed to excel there as well.
In many ways I find many completely different tasks really boil down to the same thing at some level. It's simply assimilating information, obtaining a sufficiently intuitive understanding it in a logical and clear fashion, and then applying a good dose of creativity and cleverness to apply it in novel ways. I used to be much more a fan of Tabula Rasa, but I find real life experience tends to leave less and less room to believe in such things as the years pass.
So of course none of this means he'll succeed or have any impact whatsoever. But I do think it means he has a vastly higher chance of such a happening than e.g. your average grad student who's focused on AI.