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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

> Skeptics have said that achieving this milestone would not happen within this decade, our lifetimes or even ever.

Did any credible skeptics actually claim this would never happen? If so, I'd love to hear their reasoning.

Certainly a lot of people ten years ago would have bet against this happening by 2016--especially before Monte Carlo approaches were tried. But I doubt you would have found many takers for betting against it happening in a 100 years (much less it never happening).

Autonomous vehicles are similar. IMO, it would be a fool's bet to bet against them ever happening. But it's reasonable to debate whether they'll be mainstream Level 4 consumer devices in 10 years, 25 years, or 50 years.

Enough people is skeptical about AI to make it a problem.

Now, being more specific about Go:

- Lee Sedol himself was confident he would win.

- Ke Jie said he would win against AlphaGo. I think he would lose too.

Though it's true many people were skeptical about an AI winning at Go played at this level, I think people are mostly skeptical about general AI, not about algorithms that win at playing board games. It's different to be skeptical about specialized AI than about general AI.

It took life millions of years of evolution to produce us. Look at what artificial intelligence has achieved in decades.

General AI could be the biggest ever discovery for humanity. But it will never be if we don't put a hard enough effort. The bad thing, is that economy laws seem to assign a limited effort toward it. In my opinion we should be trying harder. Worth mentioning is OpenAI (https://openai.com/), an effort by Y Combinator, Elon Musk and others. Brilliant initiative.

Overpopulation and the deterioration of the environment will push us to find solutions through AI.

environment is an issue, but I think the overpopulation card is overplayed and controversial

Overpopulation in terms of running out of space is definitely overplayed. But it's a direct multiplier for our effect on the environment. If the world's population were cut in half, we'd emit about half as much pollution, half as much greenhouse gas, half the land used for farming would be left wild, etc.

Not necessarily...carbon emissions per capita is not constant around the globe. Energy use is skewed towards modern countries, i.e United States. If you wiped out the 300 million people in the US, you would save more on carbon emissions than wiping out 300 million in China.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

That's true. It depends on which Chinese people, too! But overall, the point remains: reduce the population, reduce the environmental impact.

You mean look at what we, a product of evolution of millions of years, have produced of artificial intelligence in decades.

Wait until AI starts producing AI ;)

That's already happening, at least somewhat, right?

Your comment made me inspired to write a letter about this Lee Sedol/Go match and by the end of it, I think I address your point.

[Link](https://medium.com/@peterbsmith/computer-beats-human-at-hard...)

A neural network beating a top human at Go? Cripes, if Marvin Minsky didn't say it would never happen, I'd be stunned.

Technically, it's two neural networks, each calculating reasonably simple functions (an estimate of the value of a board position and an estimate of which moves might be good) combined with a tree search algorithm.

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