As if it weren’t enough to have AI tanning humanity’s hide (figuratively for now) at every board game in existence, Google AI has got one working to destroy us all at Ping-Pong as well. For now they emphasize it is “cooperative,” but at the rate these things improve, it will be taking on pros in no time.
The project, called i-Sim2Real, isn’t just about Ping-Pong but rather about building a robotic system that can work with and around fast-paced and relatively unpredictable human behavior. Ping-Pong, AKA table tennis, has the advantage of being pretty tightly constrained (as opposed to playing basketball or cricket) and a balance of complexity and simplicity.
“Sim2Real” is a way of describing an AI creation process in which a machine learning model is taught what to do in a virtual environment or simulation, then applies that knowledge in the real world. It’s necessary when it could take years of trial and error to arrive at a working model — doing it in a sim allows years of real-time training to happen in a few minutes or hours.
Sleek, light, high-performance, and not easy on the pocket like any other Apple device.
Earlier this week, Meta rolled out its Quest Pro Virtual Reality (VR) headset, priced at $1,499. Many questioned the need for a high-end VR headset when the company’s Quest 2 headset appears to be doing rather well. However, as Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his conversation with The Verge.
The official launch of Apple’s mixed reality headset was expected to happen in 2022. In the recent past, we have had Apple products being announced much earlier than their actual availability, so a 2022 launch could still be possible. To prepare you for such an event, here’s what you need to know about the Apple headset.
What is mixed reality?
Before we delve into the details of the device, here is a short explainer of why the Apple device is not a regular VR headset. The purpose of VR is to deliver a completely immersive experience. To do so, headsets cut the user’s focus off their surroundings by dimming the peripheral vision and providing audio, visual, and often tactile feedback to make the experience more relatable.
A while ago I spotted someone working on real time AI image generation in VR and I had to bring it to your attention because frankly, I cannot express how majestic it is to watch AI-modulated AR shifting the world before us into glorious, emergent dreamscapes.
Applying AI to augmented or virtual reality isn’t a novel concept, but there have been certain limitations in applying it—computing power being one of the major barriers to its practical usage. Stable Diffusion image generation software, however, is a boiled-down algorithm for use on consumer-level hardware and has been released on a Creative ML OpenRAIL-M licence. That means not only can developers use the tech to create and launch programs without renting huge amounts of server silicon, but they’re also free to profit from their creations.
In an interview published Tuesday with The Verge, Zuckerberg said VR, the technology he bet his entire $340 billion company on a year ago, is entering “the trough of disillusionment.” That’s a term folks in the tech industry like to use when excitement around a new technology drastically wanes.
His comments effectively place expectations for the success of the new Meta Quest Pro, which goes on sale Oct. 25, at next to zero. At the same time, Zuckerberg reiterated his belief that the metaverse will be the next iteration of computing after the smartphone — it’s just going to take a long time. Specifically, he told The Verge “it’s not going to be until later this decade” when metaverse gadgets like the Quest Pro will be “fully mature.”
But Meta isn’t selling headsets later this decade. It’s selling them now, and expecting technologists and software developers to invent compelling reasons to buy one.
In the past few years, a growing number of computer scientists have been exploring the idea of “metaverse,” an internet-based space where people would be able to virtually perform various everyday activities. The general idea is that, using virtual reality (VR) headsets or other technologies, people might be able to attend work meetings, meet friends, shop, attend events, or visit places, all within a 3D virtual environment.
While the metaverse has recently been the topic of much debate, accessing its 3D “virtual environments” often requires the use of expensive gear and devices, which can only be purchased by a relatively small amount of people. This unavoidably limits who might be able to access this virtual space.
Researchers at Beijing Institute of Technology and JD Explore Academy have recently created WOC, a 3D online chatroom that could be accessible to a broader range of people worldwide. To gain access to this chatroom, which was introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, users merely need a simple computer webcam or smartphone camera.
In this episode we explore a User Interface Theory of reality. Since the invention of the computer virtual reality theories have been gaining in popularity, often to explain some difficulties around the hard problem of consciousness (See Episode #1 with Sue Blackmore to get a full analysis of the problem of how subjective experiences might emerge out of our brain neurology); but also to explain other non-local anomalies coming out of physics and psychology, like ‘quantum entanglement’ or ‘out of body experiences’. Do check the devoted episodes #4 and #28 respectively on those two phenomena for a full breakdown. As you will hear today the vast majority of cognitive scientists believe consciousness is an emergent phenomena from matter, and that virtual reality theories are science fiction or ‘Woowoo’ and new age. One of this podcasts jobs is to look at some of these Woowoo claims and separate the wheat from the chaff, so the open minded among us can find the threshold beyond which evidence based thinking, no matter how contrary to the consensus can be considered and separated from wishful thinking. So you can imagine my joy when a hugely respected cognitive scientist and User Interface theorist, who can cut through the polemic and orthodoxy with calm, respectful, evidence based argumentation, agreed to come on the show, the one and only Donald D Hoffman.
Hoffman is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, where he studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and colour, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. So he is perfectly placed to comment on how we interpret reality.
Hoffman has received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. So his recognition in the field is clear.
He is also the author of ‘The Case Against Reality’, the content of which we’ll be focusing on today; ‘Visual Intelligence’, and the co-author with Bruce Bennett and Chetan Prakash of ‘Observer Mechanics’.
What we discuss: 00:00 Intro. 05:30 Belief VS questioning. 11:20 Seeing the world for survival VS for knowing reality as it truly is. 13:30 Competing strategies to maximise ‘fitness’ in the evolutionary sense. 15:22 Fitness payoff’s can be calculated as mathematical functions, based on different organisms, states and actions. 17:00 Evolutionary Game Theory computer simulations at UC Irvine. 21:30 The payoff functions that govern evolution do not contain information about the structure of the world. 25:00 The world is NOT as it seems VS The world is NOTHING like it seems. 29:30 Space-time cannot be fundamental. 32:30 Local and non-contextual realism have been proved false. 37:45 A User-Interface network of conscious agents. 41:30 A virtual reality computer analogy. 43:30 Space and time and physical objects are merely a user interface. 49:30 Reductionism is false. 53:30 User Interface theory VS Simulation theory. 56:30 Panpsychists are fundamentally physicalists. 57:30 Making mathematical predictions about conscious agents. 59:30 Like space and time maths are invented metrics, so must we start with consciousness metrics. 01:03:30 Experiences lead to actions, which affect other agent’s conscious experiences. 01:08:00 The notion of truth is deeper than the notion of proof and theory. 01:10:00 Consciousness projects space-time so it can explore infinite possibilities. 01:13:00 ‘Not that which the eye can see, but that whereby the eye can see’, Kena Upanishad. 01:17:30 Is nature written in the language of Maths? 01:27:00 Consciousness is like the living being, and maths is like the bones. 01:34:50 Don Hoffman on Max Tegmark’s ‘Everything that is mathematically possible is real’ 01:48:00 Different analogies for different eras.
How likely is it that we live in a simulation? Are virtual worlds real?
In this first episode of the 2nd Series we delve into the fascinating topic of virtual reality simulations and the extraordinary possibility that our universe is itself a simulation. For thousands of years some mystical traditions have maintained that the physical world and our separated ‘selves’ are an illusion, and now, only with the development of our own computer simulations and virtual worlds have scientists and philosophers begun to assess the statistical probabilities that our shared reality could in fact be some kind of representation rather than a physical place. As we become more open to these possibilities, other difficult questions start to come into focus. How can we create a common language to talk about matter and energy, that bridges the simulated and simulating worlds. Who could have created such a simulation? Could it be an artificial intelligence rather than a biological or conscious being? Do we have ethical obligations to the virtual beings we interact with in our virtual worlds and to what extent are those beings and worlds ‘real’? The list is long and mind bending.
Fortunately, to untangle our thoughts on this, we have one of the best known philosophers of all things mind bending in the world, Dr. David Chalmers; who has just released a book ‘Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy’ about this very topic. Dr. Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specialising in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU’s Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. He’s the founder of the ‘Towards a Science of Consciousness Conference’ at which he coined the term in 1994 The Hard Problem of Consciousness, kicking off a renaissance in consciousness studies, which has been increasing in popularity and research output ever since.
What we discuss in this episode: 00:00 Short Intro. 06:00 Synesthesia. 08:27 The science of knowing the nature of reality. 11:02 The Simulation Hypothesis explained. 15:25 The statistical probability evaluation. 18:00 Knowing for sure is beyond the reaches of science. 19:00 You’d only have to render the part you’re interacting with. 20:00 Clues from physics. 22:00 John Wheeler — ‘It from bit’ 23:32 Eugene Wigner: measurement as a conscious observation. 27:00 Information theory as a useful but risky hold-all language tool. 34:30 Virtual realities are real and virtual interactions are meaningful. 37:00 Ethical approaches to Non-player Characters (NPC’s) and their rights. 38:45 Will advanced AI be conscious? 42:45 Is god a hacker in the universe up? Simulation Theology. 44:30 Simulation theory meets the argument for the existence of God from design. 51:00 The Hard problem of consciousness applies to AI too. 55:00 Testing AI’s consciousness with the Turing test. 59:30 Ethical value applied to immoral actions in virtual worlds.
This metaverse meme video is about wojak who grows old in a metaverse. From the moment he is still a child and has his first school day, he already lives through his vr glasses. His school is in the metaverse, as well as his friends. Years later, he starts doubting about how “normal” living meta actually is. Didn’t people maybe have a better life back when there was no metaverse? When you did stuff offline? Who knows…
Make sure to message me when you donate to me so I can thank you personally. I appreciate your donation a lot and will use it in the crypto battle against the Bogdanoffs.
“I always think it’s important that people understand what something is,” Cook told Dutch publication Bright (via Google Translate). “And I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.” In other words, despite persistent reports of Apple’s interest in building all manner of AR and VR hardware, Cook isn’t ready to claim that the company is working towards any so-called “metaverse.”
Mark Zuckerberg has a different view. Earlier this year, the Meta CEO told his employees that the company is in a “very deep, philosophical competition” with Apple to build the metaverse. “This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience,” Zuckerberg said, contrasting what he says is Apple’s closed approach with Meta’s more interoperable development.
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.
My guest today is David Chalmers. David is a professor of philosophy and neuroscience at NYU and the co-director of NYU Centre for Mind, Brain and Consciousness.
David just released a new book called “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy”, which we discuss in this episode. We also discuss whether we’re living in a simulation, the progress that’s been made in virtual reality, whether virtual worlds count as real, whether people would and should choose to live in a virtual world, and many other classic questions in the philosophy of mind and more.
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