Comment by throwaway34241 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway34241 | Hacker News Reader

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> he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical

Yes, he seemed to put a lot of effort to try to get things through FB internal politics, and not always successfully. I really wish his experiments with a scheme-based rapid prototyping environment / VR web browser had been allowed to continue [1]. VR suffers from a lack of content, and VR itself is well-suited to creating VR content, and his VR script would surely facilitate closing that loop among other things. Although now four years later I guess FB has a large team working on a locked-down, limited world building tool (closed platform, no programming ability). Oh well.

I don't think this is the end of this wave of VR, but at this point I wouldn't be at all surprised if say Apple or someone else ends up bringing it to the mainstream instead of Facebook. [2]

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/RFlh0o6l3...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20959066/apple-augmented...

The VR vs AI comparison is interesting to me, because I think both technologies have come in “waves”. However, I think this is the last VR wave - it’s going to be on a steady gradient to ubiquity now - whilst I believe AI will winter again and there are many more waves to come, and decades (centuries?) to pass before AGI.

Reasoning being:

VR is just making what we have better. Better screens, better refresh, better batteries, better lenses etc etc. I don’t see any roadblocks.

AGI, by contrast, is not going to be a better DNN. Harder to convince people but thinking is: brain neurons are vastly most sophisticated than digital; we don’t even fully understand what neurons do; we don’t have anything other than a vague understanding of what the brain does; it is apparent that we engage in plenty of symbolic reasoning, which DNN do not do; DNNs are fooled by trivial input changes that indicate they are massively overfitting data; from what I’ve heard from researchers at top AI companies/institutions DNN design is just a matter of hacking and trying stuff until you get that specific results on your given problem, so I don’t see where DL research is actually headed; improvements are correlated with compute power increases, indicating no qualitative gains in the study of learning.

I’m incredibly impressed by DL’s achievements but I believe at best current methods could serve as data preprocessing for a future AGI.

I’m actually quite glad that AGI is so far off, because I don’t think that it’s likely big tech companies will use it responsibly.

VR OTOH is very close and is going to change everything (and IMO is likely a necessary step towards AGI).

Out of curiosity, why do you see VR as being a necessary step towards the creation of AGI? Those two don't seem related at all in any way that I can discern.

Maybe “necessary” is too strong, but “likely pivotal” is better.

If VR becomes widespread, and amazingly high quality, then almost everything we do will migrate to VR.

Once that is the case, we will have an unprecedented amount of data about human behaviour, and near endless data for training, experimenting, and testing AIs.

The problems of AI will become much easier to formulate: “replace this person in this VR scenario, interaction” etc. This will help drive research by giving clear goals.

More pragmatically, it just removes a lot of barriers to research and accidental difficulties ie you’ll just be able to fire up a VR rather than worrying about how your robot is going to pick things up or access real world data etc

That's a fascinating idea. That virtual worlds are good test-beds for AI is obvious, but I never considered that we will have thousands of hours for every person to tell us how they approach any given physical task. That's a gold mine for robotics research.

That's an interesting point. I was actually thinking more that _the virtual task will become the task we want to perform_, i.e. that almost everything we do will move into VR.

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