Maybe “necessary” is too strong, but “likely pivotal” is better.
If VR becomes widespread, and amazingly high quality, then almost everything we do will migrate to VR.
Once that is the case, we will have an unprecedented amount of data about human behaviour, and near endless data for training, experimenting, and testing AIs.
The problems of AI will become much easier to formulate: “replace this person in this VR scenario, interaction” etc. This will help drive research by giving clear goals.
More pragmatically, it just removes a lot of barriers to research and accidental difficulties ie you’ll just be able to fire up a VR rather than worrying about how your robot is going to pick things up or access real world data etc
That's a fascinating idea. That virtual worlds are good test-beds for AI is obvious, but I never considered that we will have thousands of hours for every person to tell us how they approach any given physical task. That's a gold mine for robotics research.
That's an interesting point. I was actually thinking more that _the virtual task will become the task we want to perform_, i.e. that almost everything we do will move into VR.
If VR becomes widespread, and amazingly high quality, then almost everything we do will migrate to VR.
Once that is the case, we will have an unprecedented amount of data about human behaviour, and near endless data for training, experimenting, and testing AIs.
The problems of AI will become much easier to formulate: “replace this person in this VR scenario, interaction” etc. This will help drive research by giving clear goals.
More pragmatically, it just removes a lot of barriers to research and accidental difficulties ie you’ll just be able to fire up a VR rather than worrying about how your robot is going to pick things up or access real world data etc