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':
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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @12:41PM (3 children)
I don't know enough about him to know whether he'll "succeed" or not in the state enterprise, but I envy anyone who can just give up their job for a hobby.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @12:46PM (2 children)
I mean he started by stealing resources while at Softdisk, then ousted founding employees in a bid to control more shares when they sold out to EA (which fell through, only to instead sell out to Zenimax a few years later when Doom3's id tech4 failed in the marketplace for licensing purposes.) Then he was involved with that jankyness with Palmer whatever his name was at Oculus stealing tech.
And now he's abandoning that to go fuck off on another pet project that will fail like Armadillo Aerospace did.
Good luck John, any relevance you had is long since passed. 5-10 years of stardom sure has allowed you 20 years of coasting! Not unlike my dad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @12:56PM
The highlights of his career include making Commander Keen, open sourcing Doom 3, and collecting that Facefook bread. He has done plenty.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @03:43PM
It sounds like you have a lot of anger about your dad's life choices. Does that come into play in other areas of your life too?
Perhaps you'd like to talk about it?