John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

> I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different

This means that people should glorify random unknown senior engineers they don't know about instead being fascinated by the person whose work is available and who created amazing things for past 3 decades?

> From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML

That's how everyone start, they understand a little. We have a person here who dealt with complex algorithms in difficult to master language for 30+ years. It hints at "this person has the intellectual power to grasp AI fast".

> I put him into the same category as Elon Musk

This is like comparing an Olympic winner with random person from the streets, saying their athletic ability is about the same.

Fascination and heroification with Carmack comes with a reason, people who do that are closely familiar with his work - not surface level like "He made Doom and Quake". You sound very jealous.

That's a whole lot of gatekeeping right there ;)

Big organizations ruled by money and career-driven people often run into very expensive dead ends without noticing for years (see the last AI winter, there was just too much hype, which then involved too much money being thrown around, which then lead to the usual organizational cruft).

I would also be very concerned about any field in technology, if an intelligent person cannot make meaningful contributions after a few months or years, that would probably mean the whole field is already deep into diminishing returns and needs to be 'unstuck'.

Yeah sounded weird to me too, I don’t see why artificial intelligence would get deployed in human size units most of the time. The AWS bill won’t be for 5 Amys, and I don’t think people will “dial up” to order them

The weird bit is that a lot of software engineers seem to have the idea that their work is one of the the last that will be automated. Looking at the current track and extending it out assuming no unforeseen roadblocks, typical software engineering looks to be one of the most threatened. Plumbers are much safer for longer all things considered.

The obvious rebuttal to the idea that AI will eat software engineering is "we'll always need 'software engineers' and the nature of what they do will just change", which is probably true for the foreseeable future, but ignores the fact that sufficiently advanced AI will be like a water line rapidly rising up and (economically) drowning those that fall below it and those below that line will be a very significant percentage of the population, including even most of the "smart" ones.

However this ends up shaking out, though, I think its pretty clear we're politically and economically so far from ready for the practical impact of what might happen with this stuff over the next 10-20 years that its terrifying.

"60-80% of you aren't really needed anymore" looks great on a quarterly earning statement until the literal guillotines start being erected. And even if we never quite reach that point there's still the inverse Henry Ford problem of who is your customer when most people are under the value floor relative to AI that is replacing them.

I'm not trying to suggest there aren't ways to solve the economic and political problems that the possible transition into an AI-heavy future might bring but I really just don't see a reasonable path from where we are now to where we'd need to be to even begin to solve those problems in time before massive societal upheaval.

AGI is a bit of a glib concept ... our technology will not be like an 'autaumaton'. Everything we make is 'systems' oriented, and is not at all like our human conception of 'intelligence' dervied from the fact that we humans are effectively independant from our surroundings.

'Siri', backed by ChatGPT and the 'world's data' will probably pass some 'AGI' threshold, but is 'Siri' an individual AGI? Are we all talking to the same siri? Different Siri? It's not even an entity, rather a distributed system.

Our ideas regarding AGI are perversely inluenced by the fact that we humans are automatons, but technology is not that.

It's also entirely feasible that if ChatGPT represents all possible forms of human communication, then it will perfectly emulate a human. Ok, it's really just a fancy neural network that is not theoretically 'thiking' but how does that matter? If it can rationlize sufficiently to make such interactions, who is to say it's not 'AGI'?

I think we're using the wrong concepts.