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John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

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Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#641
Why the announcement? Is it to protect Oculus/FB so it doesn't look like he's bailing out of VR?

Couldn't he just have said "I'm taking some time off" and then make an announcement when there's something to announce, ie. "So here's some progress I've made on AGI"

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a problem if you are moving in the virtual world using a different method than what your body is using in the real world. If the VR world is a simple 1:1 mapping and you can walk around in it as you do in the physical space, there is no vection.

Yes that's right. But that's a limited scenario. Not the true unbounded VR experience that we really wanted.

I was thinking more along the lines of neural connections, and you probably sitting in some comfy chair physically while roaming in your mind.

You know, however sci-fi "solves" VR. I agree with your sentiment, current "let's put displays on a headset" approach seems way too old school to me. A 20th century (flawed) solution to a true 21st century problem (much more than elec. tech it's bio-extension, very rich cognitive interface).

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#643
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses don't plan though, and they are much better than computers at a lot of tasks. If we can make a computer as smart as a horse, then we can likely also make it as smart as a human by bolting some planning logic on top of that.

“Horses don’t plan though[...]” Can you expand on this statement? While I have no way to “debug” a horse’s brain in real-time, my experiences suggest they absolutely conduct complex decision-making while engaging in activities. Two examples which immediately come to mind where I believe I see evidence of “if this, then that” planning behavior: 1. Equestrian jumping events; horses often balk before a hurdle 2. Herds o…

The context was this quote:

> intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up

In this context horses don't plan or have much capacity for shared learning, at least not as far as I know.

Quote: “This study indicates that horses do not learn from seeing another horse performing a particular spatial task, which is in line with most other findings from social learning experiments,”

https://thehorse.com/16967/navigating-barriers-can-horses-wa...

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#644
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Horses don’t plan though[...]” Can you expand on this statement? While I have no way to “debug” a horse’s brain in real-time, my experiences suggest they absolutely conduct complex decision-making while engaging in activities. Two examples which immediately come to mind where I believe I see evidence of “if this, then that” planning behavior: 1. Equestrian jumping events; horses often balk before a hurdle 2. Herds o…

The context was this quote: > intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up In this context horses don't plan or have much capacity for shared learning, at least not as far as I know. Quote: “This study indicates that horses do not learn from seeing another horse performing a particular spatial task, which is in line with most other findings from social learning exper…

Thank you for the context and new resources to learn from.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#645

This is encouraging. If you're going to work on artificial general intelligence, a reasonable context in which to work on it is game NPCs. They have to operate in a world, interact with others, survive, and accomplish goals. Simulator technology is now good enough that you can do quite realistic worlds. Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work. Robotics has the same issue…

Simulator technology is now good enough that you can do quite realistic worlds.

It is nowhere near good enough to avoid running into Moravec’s Paradox like a brick wall as soon as you try and apply it outside the simulator.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#646
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine AGI just fine. Doesn't get me one tiny little bit closer to being able to make one. There are several ways in which one could go about such a development, all we have for now is an existence proof and none of the paths pointed out so far have been viable. Whether John will come up with novel path is not really an imagination issue but one of very deep understanding of the problem space, what has been tr…

My favorite AGI so far is Cyc.

It would be great to see what Carmack could contribute to Cyc, not just his own common sense (which would be great too), but deep rich useful interesting applications of commonsense knowledge (including but not just games).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_knowledge_(artific...

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#647
post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

180 000 units of VR headsets is pure pocket money for Facebook. And that does not even register in any kind of hardware sales charts. PC sales are more than 300 millions per year, and smartphones sales are more than 1.5 billions units per year. VR headsets don't sell at all.

You're missing the point. We've entered a new era of VR with the Quest. Any numbers we've seen before is irrelevant.

What do you mean? The quest is virtually inexistent market wise. Nobody is buying it. Did you see a huge uptake anywhere? I havent.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#648
post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way i think it can be done is simulated evolution.. be that simulated evolution of neural nets or something else. As others have mentioned here though.. this becomes horrifying if we've created something sentient to kill in games or enslave.

> simulated evolution Isn't that what genetic algorithms are?

yeah, one kind i guess. Or perhaps they cover all kinds?

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#649

This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he exto…

> he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical. Sigh. I assumed the whole point of hiring John Carmack is that you trust him to identify critical problems - and to find the best way to solve them.

That's the classical plight of someone who's much smarter than those around them. It's not enough to see the right path, you'd also have to manage to convince everyone else that it's right. Technology moves by peak knowledge and insight, not the democratic average.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#650
post #596

This is encouraging. If you're going to work on artificial general intelligence, a reasonable context in which to work on it is game NPCs. They have to operate in a world, interact with others, survive, and accomplish goals. Simulator technology is now good enough that you can do quite realistic worlds. Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work. Robotics has the same issue…

I don't think that approach is going to work. For any clearly bounded and delineated task, such as a game, the most optimal, lowest energy and lowest cost solution is not AGI but a custom tuned specialist solver. This is why I don't think Deep Blue or Alphago are paths towards AGI. They are just very highly advanced single-task solvers. Now Alphago and it's implementation framework are much more sophisticated than De…

> AlphaGo didn't learn the rules of Go. It has no idea what those rules are, it's just been trained through trial and error not to break them. That's not the same thing. It's not approaching chess or Go as an intelligent thinking being, learning the rules and working out their consequences

There are indeed some people who learn chess by "reading the manual". Or learn a language by memorizing grammar rules. Or learn how to build a business by studying MBA business theories.

There are also tons of other people who do the opposite. They learn by simply doing and observing. I personally have no idea what an "adverb" is, but people seem perfectly happy with the way I write and communicate my thoughts. Would my English skills count as general intelligence, or am I just a pattern-recognition automaton? I won't dispute the pattern-recognition part, but I somehow don't feel like an automaton.

I can certainly see the potential upsides of learning some theory and reasoning from first principles. But that seems too high a bar for general intelligence. I would argue that the vast majority of human decisions and actions are made on the basis of pattern recognition, not reasoning from first principles.

One last note: "working out their consequences" sounds exactly like a lookahead decision tree

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