John Carmack pursues AGI

Starting this week, I’m moving to a "Consulting CTO" position with Oculus. I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time. As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: 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. I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI). I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it. For the time being at least, I am going to be going about it “Victorian Gentleman Scientist” style, pursuing my inquiries from home, and drafting my son into the work. Runner up for next project was cost effective nuclear fission reactors, which wouldn’t have been as suitable for that style of work. 😅

John Carmack announces that he is leaving his role as Oculus’s technical director to focus on artificial general intelligence. He jokingly describes pursuing AGI as a “Victorian Gentleman Scientist” from home, while mentioning cost-effective nuclear fission reactors as the runner-up project. The meme is used as an ironic reaction to someone choosing an impossibly ambitious new challenge instead of a more conventional career or hobby.

• @ithueti / 1656 2019-11-14