Is there any reason to expect he’ll have any success at this? Leaving aside the motivation for a fun hobby that you don’t expect anything out of.
John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
701–710 of 930 posts
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
Game AI has nothing to do with AGI (or even regular AI) beyond the surface level description OP provided. The reason game AI hasn't progressed in the last few decades isn't because technology is holding us back - after all we can already achieve impressive machine learning feats using current-gen GPUs - it's because bad NPC AI is by design , so players can learn to overcome them and succeed. Very few people want to p…
You don't optimize for competitive performance (it is trivial to design a game AI that beats every player every time given that you have control over tilting the playing field). You use the AI for bounded response variations (all NPC's act 'natural' and different from the others) and engaging procedural generation (Here is a chapter of a story, now draft an entire zone with landscape, NPC's, cities, quest story lines…
One of the design goals of game AIs is also that they are fun to play against. If they are too smart and coordinated, they try to throw you off in a way that feels "unfair" to the player.
You have to hit a spot where they are sometimes a bit surprising, but not in a way that cannot be reacted to quickly on your feet. This throws realism out of the window.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was downvoted, so I figured it must be obvious. I googled but as far as I can tell, Carmack is an engineer not a scientist. No formal scientific training, no scientific work.
The word you're looking for is academic. Carmack hasn't done academic work, but he has done plenty of scientific work. Scientific work is no less scientific if it isn't published in an academic journal. Academia doesn't hold a monopoly on the scientific method.
No, I mean scientific. What scientific work has Carmack done? I'm genuinely interested, because someone called him a scientist but I thought he was an engineer.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#704Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
The open ended simulations, similar to earth conditions, might general enough to sprout some artificial general intelligence. Put multiple intelligences in a massive multiplayer online world and have them compete for shelter and resources. It's an environment that we know has produced intelligence.
It may be a brutal struggle, but perhaps that struggle is important. Perhaps having a simulated tree fall on you is more meaningful than being reaped by some objective function at the end of an epoch.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
iirc in a recent talk with Joe Rogan, John mentioned something about robots doing judo...
Why do people of such intelligence subject themselves to being interviewed by dumb-as-a-rock Joe Rogan? I must admit that I often watch his interviews because he invites interesting people, but I can't help but cringe when Rogan gives his opinions.
Joe Rogan might not be the most knowledgeable, but he has a key characteristic that a lot of people lack. He is willing to admit that he is wrong when shown evidence and will adopt the more reasonable view as his own. While a lot of "smart" people will defend their views beyond reason just because admiting fault goes against their "being smart" persona.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe “necessary” is too strong, but “likely pivotal” is better. If VR becomes widespread, and amazingly high quality, then almost everything we do will migrate to VR. Once that is the case, we will have an unprecedented amount of data about human behaviour, and near endless data for training, experimenting, and testing AIs. The problems of AI will become much easier to formulate: “replace this person in this VR scen…
That's a fascinating idea. That virtual worlds are good test-beds for AI is obvious, but I never considered that we will have thousands of hours for every person to tell us how they approach any given physical task. That's a gold mine for robotics research.
That's an interesting point. I was actually thinking more that _the virtual task will become the task we want to perform_, i.e. that almost everything we do will move into VR.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I like to say: lots of people are working on making a car that is smart enough to drive itself wherever a human wants to go. How many people are working on a car smart enough to tell humans to fuck off, it doesn’t feel like driving anywhere today?
Self-driving cars and AGI are two different targets. We don't want a car that has a mind and can argue for itself. We want a car that's smart, but otherwise just a domesticated animal. We want to turn cars into horses.
We don't want to turn cars into horses. Have you ridden horses? They sometimes do stupid, dangerous things with no notice and it takes an experienced, attentive rider to stay in control. Like I saw a horse panic and almost buck her rider off when she was startled by a snake. Another horse seriously injured a friend of mine when it freaked out in a horse trailer and started kicking.
Don't get me wrong, I love horses. But they're living creatures with minds of their own and you have to always treat them with a certain wariness.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's a disagreement, I think you're right. Most of the benefit someone like that would get from their competence in Chess or Go would be incidental ones. In fact I would say your experience confirms my understanding of this, optimizing for a single domain in the way Alphago does or even in the way humans do, has little to do with general intelligence.
Ah, I misread. So we agree then. On the other hand, I would not be surprised if the hippocampus was highly developed in chess players like Bobby Fischer which could translate into better spatial reasoning. Perhaps general intelligence is best trained by variance.... Not targeted training.
You could be right, and for the record I upvoted your comment for the contribution regarding you experience with high level chess players. I think the downvotes you’re getting are regrettable.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
I think people do both. You learn the rules in order to play a game or perform a task, but with practice you end up training a task specific system that "knows" how to do it without thinking about the rules and perhaps without knowing them.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
What, pray tell, did Elon do that is "novel"?
Convince people to give him a lot of money to set on fire.
I mean even if both Tesla and SpaceX close tomorrow, he already achieved more in both companies than most of the current "unicorns".
He successfully made popular mass market electric vehicle, and dragged whole auto moto industry behind. There were other electric cars before tesla. But tesla made it cool, and made the rest of the industry trying hard to catch up.
SpaceX also is not the first private space firm, with their own rocket, But it's by far the most successful one, and lowered the cost of entry to space by significant amount.
Also It's probably the first private space company that has rockets that can compete with most government ones.
I am not rich enough to be buying individual stocks, so I have no personal stake in this.