He’s certainly a very smart and interesting guy but my alarm bells go off when his supposed achievements are used as justification for the piece being valid rather than… well, any of the arguments he made.
VR is a trivial idea that pretty much everyone has thought about at some point. It's implementation is hard to do, and if I had to point to anyone there, it'd be Carmack who's probably done the most.
I agree, but to be fair, grandiose misattributions are just how the field of philosophy works. Plato is commonly credited with the idea that humans have an immortal soul. I'm 100% sure that idea is tens of thousands of years old, and when I hear academics attribute it to him, I immediately discard everything else that comes out of their mouths because such claims just demonstrate a complete lack of critical thinking.
I certainly think Palmer Lucky could in many ways have at least a legitimate claim to being a founder of modern VR; his Oculus not only completely revived the industry but also showed other companies that there was indeed a market for this tech.
But I think that a better way of thinking about these systems is an imperfect world model analogy. Not a made-of-people analogy.
These models are not made of people. People helped gathering data about the world around us. And that data allowed to build a world model. Which includes models of people, along with everything else.
And it’s a world model, not a human civilization model. Data goes through the funnel of The Pile and the likes, but ultimately the predictive model is of the universe, not that of humans.
- He popularized the term 'virtual reality' in the late 80s,
- Did a bunch of stuff with music
- Spent a whole lot of time warning against social media
- Spent a whole lot of time warning against what I consider to be the best parts of the internet like Wikipedia
He is uniquely qualified to be wrong about this in a specific way.
the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it
His idea of attaching provenance to source of information used in models is a good one, and one that already has rumblings of legal weight behind it (see the various articles about copyright claims in response to GPT/Copilot).
I worry a bit that his argument is too centred on digital information creation. Though I suppose that's the novelty of the most recent pieces of technology called AI - they affect information workers, people who already use a computer interface for some large percentage of their work. Still, the topic of /physical work/ : fieldwork, factorywork, servicework, seems one or more steps removed from LLMs. The management of that work may be affected, but the work itself has already (it seems to me) gone through its first computer-revolution shock.
Edit: I'll add that the whole article has a 90s-Wired feel to it, which is refreshing to see. There's been something of a slowdown in tech-revolutions for the past decade, and it's not original to say that we may be at the start of a new one.
Is that like Shingy, the AOL digital prophet?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3
What does that even mean?
Anyone got anything earlier? Wouldn't surprise me.
Was there something written down about it by one of the ancient greeks or similar vintage?