He also has a vastly different take on privacy than most of us seem to have. He thinks it'll eventually go away and it won't be bad when it does. I believe he talked about it in one of his quakecon keynotes.

As a LONG time admirer of Carmack (I got my EE degree and went into embedded systems and firmware design due in no small part to his influence), I feel like he's honest and forthright about his stances, but also disconnected from most average people (both due to his wealth and his personality) in such a way that he's out of touch.

He's not egotistical like Elon Musk. In fact he seems humble. He also seems to approach the topics in good faith... but some of his conclusions are... distressing.

He recently described his love of computers as rooted in realizing that “they won’t talk back to you.” The job he wanted at Meta was “Dictator of VR.” When someone talks AI ethics to him, he just tunes out because he doesn’t think it’s worth even considering until they are fully sentient as the level of a human toddler, at which point you can turn them on and off and modify their development until you have a perfect worker. His reason for working in AI is that he thinks it’s where a single human can have the largest leverage on history.

All that paraphrased from the Lex interview.

I see him as the guy who builds the “be anything do anything” singularity, but then adds a personal “god mode” to use whenever the vote goes the wrong way. Straight out of a Stephenson novel.

On the other hand, he’s not boring!

He is a workaholic, in a positive way. But i get the feeling as long as he has a problem he enjoys "grinding out" the solution to, not much else matters -- apart from the obvious of family and close friends.

Still, I can't fault his honesty. He doesn't seem to hold anything back in the interviews I've seen.

I think there is a point to be made that if one could do the work, is offered the work, but thinks it's ethically questionable: go there and be an ethical voice.