In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block on the Lyndon B Johnson freeway in Mesquite, Texas, to start a new job. The building had a jet black glass exterior and sat utterly incongruent amid acres of car parks, single-storey industrial units and strip malls. Game designer Sandy Petersen called it the Devil's Rubik's Cube. Taylor's new workplace was on the sixth floor in office 615. The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above.

Since its release in 1993, id Software's DOOM franchise has become one of modern gaming's most easily recognizable IPs. The series has sold more than 10 million copies to date and spawned myriad RPG spinoffs, film adaptations and even a couple tabletop board games. But the first game's debut turned out to be a close thing, id Software cofounder John Romero describes in an excerpt from his new book DOOM GUY: Life in First Person. With a mere month before DOOM was scheduled for release in December 1993, the iD team found itself still polishing and tweaking lead programmer John Carmack's novel peer-to-peer multiplayer architecture, ironing out level designs -- at a time when the studio's programmers were also its QA team -- and introducing everybody's favorite killer synonym to the gamer lexicon. Published and reprinted by permission of Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. In early October, we were getting close to wrapping up the game, so progress quickened.

The news leaked out, creating a wave that will soon become a tsunami with new layoffs and a change in the existing setting, but also an upheaval of future plans since Zuckerberg abandoned Metaverse. There was no major announcement or press release. There were just a few subtle signs that the metaverse was no longer Meta's top goal, hidden in blog postings and earnings calls. A shift in artificial intelligence has already succeeded the king of our future: Metaverse. After the big announcement, at the company's annual Connect conference in October 2021, Zuckerberg explained how his firm planned to create a new version of the internet as well as the company's renaming from Facebook to Meta.

As we continue to make strides in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), one concept that has been gaining momentum is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Unlike traditional AI systems, AGI aims to replicate the human-like ability to learn, reason and adapt in any given situation. In other words, AGI seeks to create a machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human can do. This level of sophistication is still far from being achieved, but experts predict that once we create AGI, it will be a major turning point in human history, with implications far beyond what we can currently imagine. In this article, we'll dive into what experts are saying about AGI and what it could mean for the future of humanity.

I've got some of these perceptions and systems technology and emergent behavior pieces that are relevant to this, and I'm smart enough to apply the necessary things. So, while I've got people that invested $20 million in my company, I'm not telling them that I'm likely to have the breakthrough for artificial general intelligence. Instead, I'm saying there's a non-negligible chance that I will personally figure out some of the important things that are necessary for this. The emergence of artificial general intelligence in a way that can impact the economy really is a'change-the-world-level' event, where this is something that reshapes almost everything that human beings can do. This is something that is almost the largest scale that you can think about.

Technology companies are racing to develop human-level artificial intelligence, whose development poses one of the greatest risks to humanity. Last week, John Carmack, a software engineer and video game developer, announced that he has raised 20 million dollars to start Keen Technologies, a company devoted to building fully human-level AI. He is not the only one. There are currently 72 projects around the world focused on developing a human-level AI, also known as an AGI -- meaning an AI which can do any cognitive task at least as well as humans can. Many have raised concerns about the effects that even today's use of artificial intelligence, which is far from human-level, already has on our society.

Legendary coder John Carmack is leaving Facebook's Oculus after six years to focus on a personal project -- no less than the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, or "Strong AI." He'll remain attached to the company in a "Consulting CTO" position, but will be spending all his time working on, perhaps, the AI that finally surpasses and destroys humanity. AGI or strong AI is the concept of an AI that learns much the way humans do, and as such is not as limited as the extremely narrow machine learning algorithms we refer to as AI today. AGI is the science fiction version of AI -- HAL 9000, Replicants and, of course, the Terminator. There are some good ones out there, too -- Data and R2-D2, for instance. So far AGI has yet to be even defined in any serious way, let alone approached by researchers.

John Carmack, who was recently announced as the recipient of the first-ever Accenture VR Lifetime Achievement Award, has announced that he is stepping back from VR development. Carmack said in a Facebook post that, as of this week, he'll transition to "Consulting CTO" at Oculus VR--until now he was the regular, everyday CTO--which will enable him to have a voice in future development, while only taking up "a modest slice of my time." Carmack said that his previous efforts in game development, aerospace engineering (on top of everything else, Carmack is literally a rocket scientist), and VR have always afforded him some degree of a "line of sight" to solutions. Now he wants to see what happens when he doesn't have that advantage. "I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn't in sight," he wrote.

Carmack, son of local television news reporter Stan Carmack, grew up in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area where he became interested in computers at an early age. He attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas and Raytown South High School in nearby Raytown, Missouri. Carmack was introduced to video games with the 1978 shoot'em up title Space Invaders in the arcades during a summer vacation as a child. The 1980 maze chase arcade game Pac-Man also left a strong impression on him. He cited Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired.[4]

Carmack, son of local television news reporter Stan Carmack, grew up in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area where he became interested in computers at an early age. He attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas and Raytown South High School in nearby Raytown, Missouri. Carmack was introduced to video games with the 1978 shoot'em up title Space Invaders in the arcades during a summer vacation as a child. The 1980 maze chase arcade game Pac-Man also left a strong impression on him. He cited Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired.[4]