Your disillusion really resonates with my experience, and likely many others. The thing is, if you had succeeded in all you wanted, you would still be asking the same questions by now.
There are times for disillusion in everyone’s life.
Look at it as an opportunity. A moment in the now - where you are not only open to, but also craving, for a new direction or a different mindset on the direction to move forward.
I strongly believe in correct forward.
That means valuing your previous experiences, valuing feedback from others in the present, and striving for better in the future.
What Keynesian response? A Keynesian response would be a fiscal response to a fall in aggregate demand by governments, not a monetary one by central banks.
That's the old problem that those who call themselves, and between them, keynesians ignore the first part of fiscal responsibility on good times.
According to tome better read than me it doesn't help that Keynes ideas floated during his writings so many contradictory ideas can be read and/or inferred from it.
The world would have looked differently if the Mirasol technology ever took of. It was a large e-ink that could do color and had a refresh rate good enough for video. Most impressively, it could have been produced at existing display plants with some modifications. Unfortunately, the MEMS technology was close but no quite there as the displays degraded. Beautiful displays however, extremely energy proficient, and absolutely splendid in daylight. A bit dull, but very comfortable indoors.
AGI is not a research problem but an imagination problem. I can’t vouch for how good John Carmack is in imagination, but striving to put things together with a goal seems like a good place to start.
I can imagine AGI just fine. Doesn't get me one tiny little bit closer to being able to make one. There are several ways in which one could go about such a development, all we have for now is an existence proof and none of the paths pointed out so far have been viable. Whether John will come up with novel path is not really an imagination issue but one of very deep understanding of the problem space, what has been tried so far, why it did not work and then to come up with something that either fell through the cracks as non-viable and then to recycle it in a way that it is viable (the current neural net applications are like that) or an entirely novel approach. The latter will likely come from an outsider but it would be an extremely lucky shot to hit something workable; the former may be a possibility worth investigating.
The reason why the latter has some chance is there are sometimes approaches tried early on in a field that can't succeed because something else needs to be invented first; or the computing power required is prohibitively expensive. Carmack's skills and ability to absorb knowledge might help to spot such an opportunity.
The parent's point was that reaching AGI isn't merely a research problem, in the sense of X amount of person-hours of research by typical researchers will solve the problem. Rather, we need new ideas and new conceptual frameworks, i.e. new imaginative leaps to reveal the path forward towards AGI.
Could you list a few fields of research where "X amount of person-hours of research by typical researchers will solve the problem"? I can't think of one.
It's not about fields specifically, but about particular problems within fields. An example is neuroscience discovering the function of some unknown functional unit of the brain. We have all the conceptual machinery to solve the problem, we just need to fill in the details. On the other hand, the problem of consciousness doesn't even have the conceptual machinery in place such that more details will lead to the solution. A solution here will require conceptual leaps that we can't put a boundary on like we reasonably can when the conceptual groundwork is already established.
In mathematics the word used for these kinds of problems is "inaccessible", e.g. Reimann Hypothesis or (previously) Fermat'a Last Theorem. I don't know if Carmack's chances are as good as Wiles' were but certainly better than the average joe. It's also the case that AI is a substantially younger field (arguably it was only possible to correctly evaluate ideas since powerful GPUs were released this decade) and so the difficulty of open problems including AGI is not yet known.
It would be great to see what Carmack could contribute to Cyc, not just his own common sense (which would be great too), but deep rich useful interesting applications of commonsense knowledge (including but not just games).
In this case, when there is absolutely no intellectual property to talk about, everyone huddles down and hopes that no one notices their investment. In other cases, the proprietary body attempts to sell the IP to cover debts. Shareholders walk but are usually eligible to pay for the IP at the same rate as any other buyer. Sometimes this is used by shady boards to get control of a company and their IP.
There are times for disillusion in everyone’s life.
Look at it as an opportunity. A moment in the now - where you are not only open to, but also craving, for a new direction or a different mindset on the direction to move forward.
I strongly believe in correct forward.
That means valuing your previous experiences, valuing feedback from others in the present, and striving for better in the future.
I would say you are two thirds there buddy!