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.

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.

A field that is bringing alot of commotion and noise is Artificial Intelligence. But something that really fascinates me is a subset of that field known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or the holy grail of Artificial Intelligence. Many of today's machine learning or deep learning algorithms would be classified as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). I believe many of these algorithms are rapidly proliferating at the back end of most technologies we currently use from ride-sharing apps to social media and to other applications. And I believe that will continue to happen at an exponential pace until many specific tasks can be done better by algorithms than by humans.

John Carmack, CTO of Oculus and recent recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in VR, is scaling back his duties at Oculus. In a Facebook post, he states that he will become a'Consultant CTO' for Oculus while pursuing a much more ambitious goal: Artificial General Intelligence. In other words, technical genius John Carmack, who revolutionised video games and then VR, is now going to help bring about human-like, or even human-surpassing, AI. While a radical shift in focus like this may seem out of the blue, there have been hints recently that Carmack isn't as engaged by VR as he once was. In his recipients' speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's VR Awards, he talked about how he felt VR wasn't advancing quickly enough for him to feel satisfied.

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 is without a doubt one of the best software engineers the world has ever seen. How he fares will ultimately come down to whether our current block on developing AGI is caused by engineering, hardware, or theory (or a combination thereof). If it's just a matter of fitting together the pieces we've already developed in the right way then he honestly has a chance at making some headway. If it turns out we need substantially more computing power or more theoretical insight on the nature of intelligence then this is going to be pretty futile.

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]