Nvidia’s AI recreated Pac-Man just by watching it being played

With the growth of robotics and artificial intelligence, it’s natural for many people to feel that their jobs could be on the line in the future as they get replaced by robots that can do things faster for longer and without complaining. Some industries are safer than others and one of those industries I felt would be reasonably safe was the software development one. After all, someone needs to program the robots and keep them under control…right?

Well, if this new project by Nvidia is anything to go by, well then, I’m not feeling too optimistic about my prospects for the future in my chosen profession. With the new project, Nvidia was able to teach an AI system to recreate the game of Pac-Man simply by watching it being played. There is no coding involved, no pre-rendered images for the software to draw on. The AI model is simply fed visual data of the game in action along with the accompanying controller inputs and then recreates it frame by frame from this information. The resulting game is playable by humans, and Nvidia says it will be releasing it online in the near future.

The resultant image shown by the company is by no means perfect, as the images themselves do look rather blurry and it’s likely the actual game may feature some differences in the algorithms for the different characters. However, the output is still remarkable and it’s scary to think that the more AI learns different games or forms of programming that it may in the future be able to produce software simply through us describing what we want from it.

I guess its time to keep those Plan B options open just in case I need to find a new skill in the future that robots can’t replace. Any suggestions for careers that aren’t doomed to be taken by robot overlords in the future?