261–270 of 930 posts
I was wondering why his tweeting about graphics and VR went to 0. We've gone back into the part of the cycle where VR is an odd curiousity again, haven't we?
Unfortunately VR turned out to be an intensely nauseating puke fest for a lot of people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many historical figures went through the same thing? Who do we know for their contributions to field X, when 99% of their life was spent contributing to field Y?
Isaac Newton spent most of his life pursuing alchemy and obscure theological ideas, and found it a real nuisance whenever anyone pestered him about math or physics.
AGI is not an engineering problem but a research problem. John Carmack is good at putting stuff together but how good he is at coming up with novel concepts for an open research problem remains to be seen. Even the rocketry example that is hailed here as a success mostly wasn't. That doesn't make me happy, it would have been far nicer if Armadillo had succeeded, more competition in that space is better. But for all t…
AGI is not a research problem but an imagination problem. I can’t vouch for how good John Carmack is in imagination, but striving to put things together with a goal seems like a good place to start.
The reason why the latter has some chance is there are sometimes approaches tried early on in a field that can't succeed because something else needs to be invented first; or the computing power required is prohibitively expensive. Carmack's skills and ability to absorb knowledge might help to spot such an opportunity.
There's no such thing as AGI in my opinion. There is no way to create a "conscious" machine. We might be able to come up with some reasonably impressive imitations, but nothing that is conscious or actually thinking like a human.
AGI is not an engineering problem but a research problem. John Carmack is good at putting stuff together but how good he is at coming up with novel concepts for an open research problem remains to be seen. Even the rocketry example that is hailed here as a success mostly wasn't. That doesn't make me happy, it would have been far nicer if Armadillo had succeeded, more competition in that space is better. But for all t…
Carmack is someone who has proven to be an almost unequalled productivity machine when working on medium-difficulty problems... Now, for the first time, we'll see if his approach to problem solving can also work on a truly difficult problem. I agree it's very much an open question.
This is a very artfully written statement. It avoids the most more devastating headline of “John Carmack Stepping Down”. (Yes, going part-time isn’t the same as leaving entirely, but still).
I've long thought that the issue with VR is a conceptual one, not a technical one and maybe that frustration comes from there. "Running forward" is an unsolved problem in room scale VR. For a seated experience, you're basically back to a neat display gimmick + accurate hand tracking.
Any real solutions need, on the one side, real-world physical constructions (think running threadmills) that soon hit holodeck-level limitations and, on the other, software that actually benefits from the real technology VR brings to interactive media: super accurate hand- and head-tracking. The first gets impractical/impossible soon, the second limits development to a few niche genres: Shooting ranges, cockpit sims, dance/party games and some vague "experiences" where the actual tech is pretty much ignored and you just say "but it feels so immersive!" (honestly, it does work for horror games!). It's basically motion controls 2.0.
The only place I could see the technology shine is, oddly enough, AR. It has way less mainstream hype to it but it makes much more sense because you actually benefit from the tracking of your real-world movement: You're still a part of it! The holo-lens demos that pop up on youtube might seem clumsy, but I can totally see a use case for replacing physical monitors with arbitrarily sized and positioned displays you can virtually move in any office space. There's rumors of Apple working with Valve on AR tech. If there's any technology that could follow the smart phone, AR is my bet. I'm honestly surprised Carmack didn't move in that direction rather than deciding to become a general AI guru.