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Comment by denim_chicken | Hacker News Reader

It feels really weird to see someone being showered with congratulations for beating a computer program. What exactly is he being congratulated for? For probably triggering and then capitalizing on a bug in AlphaGo's AI? For showing that human resolve, perseverance and a "fighting spirit" can trump a flawed AI, at least until the AI gets fixed? For giving DeepMind extremely valuable test data that will only accelerate the refinement of AlphaGo's AI? For helping to advance an amoral field of study that can potentially delegitimize everything that currently makes humans unique and extraordinary?

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As noted by the live commentator, this has the opportunity to be the third revolution of the game of Go, opening again new ways of playing for the whole of humanity.

Imagine what AI, in different fields, means for humanity if it has so much to teach us, just by being able to "think" differently. I sure hope that one day they start writing philosophy and, doing so, potentially legitimize everything that currently makes humans unique and extraordinary.

a computer that loves wisdom?

What are the other two revolutions of game of Go?

cf post game 3 conference commentary : https://youtu.be/qUAmTYHEyM8?t=20639

(also during the actual game with more details, but I can not find the exact time again). Edit : can not find game3 commentary but during game 4 he is coming back to it again with interesting details as for why this is a great opportunity to inspire human players : https://youtu.be/yCALyQRN3hw?t=7097

Basically, once in ancient Japan and more recently a Chinese origin player in Japan, both incredibly strong players, surprised everyone with never before seen moves that subsequently where integrated in modern game theory. The hope is that the same could happen here.

Perhaps you'd like a shot at explaining why AI is an "amoral field of study", and why it could "delegitimize everything that currently makes humans unique and extraordinary"?

Dolphins are about as intelligent as us, too. Are dolphins amoral? Do they delegitimize Beethoven, Tesla, Gödel, Einstein, and da Vinci?

Not really related, but dolphins are assholes!

http://www.deepseanews.com/2013/02/10-reasons-why-dolphins-a...

Frankly many pre-modern, pre-civilizarion humans were assholes. Read many studies or accounts of life in relatively isolated tribal societies and hair curlingy awful accounts of violent and sometimes institutionalised abuse are uncomfortably common. Leave the safety catches off basic human urges for long and it can get pretty ugly.

> Frankly many pre-modern, pre-civilizarion humans were assholes.

While it's somewhat news to me, I'm very glad to hear we've moved past that.

I hope that was irony.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

Yes, I know, it's just completely insane to declare that we've somehow qualitatively moved past our brutish origins as long as torture, rape, and murder remain de facto extensions to politics.

I have no reason to doubt that quantitatively we have made some progress - although Pinker's arguments are most definitely not universally accepted in the scientific community.

Very much so. Many modern, "civilized" humans are assholes, and now we've got global audiences for it!

Dolphins definitely delegitimize Beethoven.

> Dolphins are about as intelligent as us, too. Are dolphins amoral? Do they delegitimize Beethoven, Tesla, Gödel, Einstein, and da Vinci?

If we invented dolphins, and they began to replace and displace us, then maybe? I don't think it is about the intelligence, but in how we use it of course. Dolphins don't really have any control of my life or those around me.

That sounded a lot more paranoid than I meant, I actually agree with what I think you are saying

> Dolphins are about as intelligent as us, too

How are you making this comparison?

I think Bud wanted to make a different point. Ie that AI doesn't delegitimize us---whatever that even means. Dolphins were just an example. He could have used Neanderthals, or Aliens.

Lee Sedol will forever be known as the first human to defeat AlphaGo in Game 4, and potentially the last one too.

That's quite an accomplishment.

Maybe they should fork version 18 as the hard but human betable version of alphago

How about just for playing a good game of Go?

So I suppose the fact that the opponent is a computer program should not be factored into the reaction to Sedol's win at all.

I hope your reductionist explanation is not accurate because it would imply that we are already so highly conditioned to machines and to AI that this match is thought to be no different from a match between two humans.

The machine beat him 3 times and was more or less expected to win again. It didn't, which would imply that Sedol played an exceptionally good game. Seems pretty obvious to me.

You're acting like following arbitrary sets of rules to maximize a value function isn't something that computers excel at. The only thing that was holding up computers for Go was simply time; there were too many possibilities to consider. Humans are really, really good at heuristically trimming possibilities, but sometimes to the detriment of finding maxima.

You know that computers beating us at chess allowed us to get better at chess, right?

Fan Hui, the professional player they beat late last year, already improved his game by quite a bit from the occasional match with AlphaGo (deepmind hired him as a consultant to test). He's won every single game in the last European championship, and moved from around top 600th player in the world to around top 300.

Wow. I know nothing about go, but 600--->300 sounds like quite an improvement.

A quote by Lee Sedol from years ago (might be apocryphal, couldn't find the original source):

Q: We heard there's now an anti-Lee Sedol website in Korea?

A: I don't even have time for my fans. I don't care about haters. ("나를 좋아하는 팬들에게도 신경을 못 쓰는데 그들에겐 당연히 신경 끈다.")

>For helping to advance an amoral field of study that can potentially delegitimize everything that currently makes humans

Or, writing from the point of view of our mechanical successors to this world, for helping to advance a highly ethical field that could exterminate that genocidaly murderous evolutionary abomination that was the human race. Who incidentally thought they were extraordinary but couldn't even play Go.

I don't think this comment should be so shouted down. Besides the politeness that typically comes with these events, it does feel strange to congratulate, on top of normal politeness, Se-dol's victory.

And for a game that was thought to be many decades away in terms of computer capabilities, this probably should be a time to think of the possible consequences of AI improvement and take a close look at it.

I think (or at least hope) most of the downvotes have nothing to do with congratulations, and only refer to the part where AI is called "an amoral field of study that can potentially delegitimize everything that currently makes humans unique and extraordinary".

That line of reasoning would be worth a laugh, if it wasn't so widespread in the general population.

Perhaps still better than my friend, who thinks suffering is what makes humans special. Discussions with him are, well, interesting.

Maybe introduce your friend to buddhist ideas of ending suffering via meditation. Might be another interesting discussion.

I think Buddhism is where he got that idea from.

amoral

>Both have to do with right and wrong, but amoral means having no sense of either

Well that's true then! A nice quote is from Feynman in regards to scientific research.

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. — Richard Feynman "

We really have no idea yet how this AI research will play out.

I don't quite like the line "Delegitimize all that makes people unique and special" But that's my only real disagreement.

If developments in AI can delegitimise human intelligence, then it was never "legitimate" in the first place (whatever that means).

>For giving DeepMind extremely valuable test data that will only accelerate the refinement of AlphaGo's AI?

You're treating Lee Seedol as if he is a fixed dataset to be trained on. Why can't he also be a "NN" who can also "refine" his AI[0] and thus be hearder for Alpha Go to compete with?

You're putting too much faith in the machine and dropping the person, that might not be completely fair.

[0] Albeit not artificial in this case.

> For helping to advance an amoral field of study that can potentially delegitimize everything that currently makes humans unique and extraordinary?

If you care about being unique and extraordinary more than about reason, knowledge, truth, the observable reality, and the search for what it really means to be sentient, then and only then you may call AI "amoral".

Also, you are being racist against artificial sentient beings, and being racist is hopefully not what makes humans extraordinary.

racist is, imo, a strange word to use there

Yes to all of the above, except the last.

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