John Carmack, who we can call the father of the FPS genre, doesn’t want to be the CTO of Oculus on a day-by-day basis – he remains as a consultant in this role, though.

A few days ago, we wrote about Carmack that he received a VR lifetime award, and shortly after that, he posted the following on Facebook (no surprises there; Oculus is owned by Facebook…): „Starting this week, I’m moving to a “Consulting CTO” position with Oculus. I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time. As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace [we have to add here that Carmack is a rocket scientist – the ed.], and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague “line of sight” to the solutions, even if they were unconventional or unproven. I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.

I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI). I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it. For the time being at least, I am going to be going about it “Victorian Gentleman Scientist” style, pursuing my inquiries from home, and drafting my son into the work. Runner up for the next project was cost-effective nuclear fission reactors, which wouldn’t have been as suitable for that style of work.”

Best of luck to Carmack then: if he can evolve the technology faster than what VR could do in the past few years (he expressed disappointment about that), then it could work out for him.

Source: PCGamer

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