Artificial intelligence could herald Facebook announces a wireless RM854 virtual reality headset four-day working week, says Jack Ma
FACEBOOK has just dropped a bombshell on the virtual reality world earlier this week: a US$200 (RM854) virtual reality headset that doesn’t require wires or a smartphone to work.
The headset could go a long way to helping Facebook get virtual reality into the hands of a “a billion people” - a (timeframefree) goal chief executive Mark Zuckerberg set at a developers conference hosted by its VR company Oculus.
The price of virtual reality headsets has continued to drop, making the technology more accessible to a variety of people. Setting a US$200 price for a headset that doesn’t require any additional equipment, however, is a new landmark for the industry.
The Oculus Go is set to ship early next year. It will be able to use all the apps currently available for the Gear VR, the Samsung and Oculus headset that requires a smartphone to work. Developers will be able to get their hands on Oculus Go in November to make more specialised software for it.
Like the Gear VR, the Go is designed to be for lighter virtual reality experiences such as 360viewing or short play sessions. It will also ship with a controller that users can hold in one hand, to point, poke or otherwise interact with the environment around them.
Oculus also gave more information on a product nicknamed Project Santa Cruz, which promises to offer high-end VR without wires or the external trackers that VR users currently have to set up around their rooms. Facebook also announced plans to introduce streaming 360-degree video to Oculus as well as Facebook Spaces, the network’s “social VR” space. — Washington Post HANGZHOU: Billionaire Alibaba entrepreneur Jack Ma has said that artificial intelligence (AI) won’t make human beings redundant in a keynote speech at Alibaba Cloud’s Computing Conference here. Ma’s attitude to AI is contrary to some of the more apocalyptic warnings from Western technology entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, not to mention physicist Stephen Hawking. Ma argued that human beings ought to have more confidence in their abilities, particularly the ‘wisdom’ they possess that AI will never have. “Peopleare getting more worried about the future, about technology replacing humans, eliminating jobs and widening the gap between the rich and the poor,” said Ma.
“But I think these are empty worries. Technology exists for people. We worry about technology because we lack confidence in ourselves, and imagination for the future.”
Ma added that humans possess one thing that cannot be programmed. “People will always surpass machines because people possess wisdom,” he said.
That wisdom, he added, is reflected not by the losses of the world’s best Go players to the IA-powered AlphaGo computer, but in the creation of the game in the first place. “AlphaGo should compete against AlphaGo 2.0, not us. There’s no need to be upset that we lost. It shows that we’re smart, because we created it,” he said.