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.

We have decided to give an award for the silliest arguments against AI published each year. The Simon Newcomb Awards, as they are called, will be announced here in the AI Magazine. Winners will be presented with a small statue (informally referred to as a'Simon') in a short ceremony at a suitable national gathering. We invite nominations for future awards. He combined a solid confidence in his own reasoning with a disdain for practical experiments. In many ways his arguments are similar to recent attacks on AI. They are short, elegant, convincing to his contemporaries, utterly wrong, and wonderfully silly, displaying an appealing mixture of partial insight with a failure to really comprehend what he was talking about. For example, there was the Stopping Problem argument. "Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane," suggested Newcomb sarcastically, "darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second! It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop?" (Newcomb, 1901). Newcomb intended his question rhetorically, but as everyone now knows, it has a perfectly good answer: "Very carefully." The Simon Newcomb Award will be given in recognition of a similarly silly published argument against AI, especially when the writer's confidence in his views seems to arise from his ignorance of the subject. The ideal candidate is an eminent scientist or scholar in some other field -- for example, a philosopher, sociologist or mathematician -- who clearly fails to grok some basic idea of computer science. While any published argument may be nominated for the prize, the committee gives highest credit to arguments which are not just idiotic, but which use some technical issue in a way that displays some, but not enough, insight. Some argument forms are already judged unacceptable, includthan they are now, or that people would be somehow reduced in status. The award is to be given for a specific argument, so that (just as with the Academy awards) a true star might receive a'Simon' for each of several outstanding performances. We also expect to award the occasional'Lifetime Achievement Award' in recognition of an entire career of silly attacks on the subject. Popular nominees (those supported by several submissions) will be announced at the same time as the Award winners. Those who are nominated but not selected for an Award may take solace in knowing that the nomination itself is a high honor. The nominees for the first Simon Newcomb Award were, Selmer Bringsjord, Harry Collins, Hubert Dreyfus, Gerald Edelman, Walter Freeman, Roger Penrose, Joseph Rychlak, John Searle, and Maurice Wilkes. In the future, only one award will normally be made each year, but for this inaugural occasion, we are proud to announce four winners, in alphabetical order.

The Lovie Awards were privileged to honour Yann LeCun with the 2016 Lovie Lifetime Achievement Award for his work as a pioneer in the creation of neural networks. LeCun's contributions to the science of machine learning, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience among other learned fields, is legendary. As a founder of Neural Nets, LeCun applied biological methods of perception to computer processors. Currently continuing his forward-thinking work as the Head of Artificial Intelligence at Facebook, LeCun is poised to see his genius bear inventive innovations to the social media platform that will affect a global user base. As he continues to inform and experiment with the future of mediums such as the incredibly fast-growing arena of machine learning, LeCun's work will only improve upon the already impressive technologies he has brought to fruition.