The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go

I used to feel guilty about it, people need to make a living, but the tracking is creepy in the extreme and the ads got to be pretty invasive. If they made ads that were fun or funny or insightful or had some value, that's different, but they just seem annoying to me.

But if we make a general purpose AI that can adapt against any discovered winning strategies instead of falling into repeatedly losing, it won't be our equal. It will have surpassed us.

It can also let the experimenting to its opponents and learn from that. That largely is what humans do, too. Generals plan for the last war, and the students who aren't challenged tend to learn badly or not at all.

And, apparently, the Google AI for go would learn from losing games. Whether it would learn enough to eventually beat (or at least tie) every possible strategy thrown at it, afaik is an open question.

Well, yea. In training, AlphaGo played against itself, and lost every one of those games. (Incidentally, it also won every one.)

Science fiction lied to us. It is science fantasy. A fantasy where you have human away parties and depictions of human agency roughly analagous (albeit glamourized) to the role we have always had bringing history up to this point.

Some people value human agency (1) and the human condition and want to preserve it almost for ecological reasons - it is the world we know, and the only one with meaning. Others I think fear death or hate injustice and (optimistically) see technology as a way to solve all these problems once and for all. Human (2) pride be damned (3).

1) possibly mainly white men, since we apparently have more of it

2) (White male)

3) Sweeping blanket statement I know. Sorry for the identity politics bit too, but you cannot really say anything on the human condition without someone saying or thinking that is is a different affair for other people.