I mean, that's like asking whether marathon runners have a future now that we've got cars. Exercising one's brain/having pleasure through the game could be an end in itself, and is independent of how machines perform.
This really suggests that going the path of being the strongest is no longer sensical. Why would a human try to be the best calculator in the world, knowing it will never beat any calculator ever? Just to prove itself to other human caculator wannabes? Senseless.
This is a real paradigm shift and we still need to understand what to do. But obliviously ignore AlphaGo is akin should be unfathomable for a professional aspiring player.
As a professional, the first question to ask is what will AlphaGo bring to Go Theory. We still dont know how much stronger it is than Lee Sedol (or how far it is from "God"). Pushing it to its limits will show us insights we havent found yet and we will update ourselves as players to the most current theory.
The second step is answering the following question: Can human + AlphaGo beat Alpha Go? A human potentiated with AlphaGo's reading power can intuitively pick variations that would give it an edge? If so, we have found that Go still harbors a human secret that is jsut overly compensated by reading.
The last step would be, even if human participation gives negligible results, can human + Alpha Go create better games than Alpha Go?
The super GMs of the world - and basically all of the chess loving public with them - seem to have acknowledged it and moved on; why would such a transition be impossible in Go?
I cannot speak for Chess's mindset but as a Devoted Go Player, we are collectively trying to solve it, and so we have for centuries. We play Go to explore its universe and reach utmost understanding of the game(and a glimpse of ourselves). If we ever find(which eventually we shuold) the exact single pattern that is best for both players, and we solve the game, it becomes something different. Maybe it becomes something senseless, or something artful(I can explain the 'art' part if someone asks) but trying to be competitive is silly.
If I devoted my life to Go today, I would not aim at becoming better competing, I'd have to aim at a more effective way to solve the game. Competing was the only thing we had to figure out what was best, but now we can have a companion that will prevent us from faulty variations and logic, and give us instant validation. We can discover more fuseki with a focus group and AlphaGo in a month than in a decade of tournaments.
Competing for the sake of competing is a petty goal.
This makes me much more angry than it probably should. Who are you to decide what is or what is not a petty goal? People will always do what they enjoy, and if they enjoy competition then that is what they will do. There is nothing wrong or petty about that.
Is there a literature available in English that explores this attitude/practice? It sounds most interesting. You seem to derive significant meaning from the game and I'm interested in how groups of people find meaning in collective activities.
This is a professional or go devotee mindset, not a typical amateur player that plays without the intent of changing Go Theory or making a legacy.
Is there a particular reason why a chess computer would be any more undefeatable than a Go computer? Even though Kasparov lost, Nakamura destroyed Rybka 10 years later. Now that we have a competitive Go AI, isn't it likely the game of Go will shift and be even more competitive since now more players can get world-class practice and suggestions on their own?
It played better because it knew the exact consequences of the options it was presented, and could calculate it and make better decisions than human intuition. No human can develop that reading power, and its not reasonable to think a human in the future will have intuition that beats the calculation of AlphaGo.
Since reading, the core ability of Go can now be completely replaced by a computer, the question is what others decisions can a player make. Can he make strategic decisions better than AlphaGo? Can intuition still best AlphaGo calculating capacity?
Eventually, we can think that we will have computational power to actually solve Go, and if there is any sense at all to play Go after that, its about finding those beautiful games, from beginning to end, that provoke emotions and turn Go purely into art.
I'd argue, though, that this is merely a proof of deep learning being able to solve "hard" problems. There's headlines everywhere about deep learning solving previously "impossible" image recognition problems, for example. Fields that are much more interesting and relevant in their real-world impact. AlphaGo, in comparison, seems like a PR/pet project. It mostly exists to play Go really well. It's a sub-branch of uses of the technology, not a start.
In that regard, Lee Sedol has done the game of Go a great service by being so gracious in defeat (and for once, the media headlines actually mirror his humility and maturity). That has actually been my lasting impression from the match.
I don't think they are the same things. Marathon is about the physical limit of human beings, while Go is about mental limit.
Before there are cars, or trains, we all know we are not the fastest in the world. A rabbit can easily overrun an adult human.
However, we never thought that a dog or a bird will beat us in a game like GO. Thinking a machine beating the human champion in the game of GO, is like admitting that we are intelligently inferior to machines.
Is this Poe's Law in action?
Likewise, if machines can do quality accounting, does that mean that accounts will be relegated to special accounting events, just like there are marathon events, where people come for aesthetic enjoyment or audience spectacle?
There's real cases of similar technology putting people out of jobs, for example I recently read that more and more finance firms more or less completely automate a lot of processes, even those where you'd traditionally would have counted on people's "gut feelings". Deep learning is eerily good at simulating "gut feelings".