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Comment by st1x7 | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to be dismissive of the way you feel. I just want to point out that you have nothing to worry about. Now that AlphaGo exists humanity is exactly where it was before it existed. AlphaGo isn't intelligent like you and I are intelligent. It's just a program that's good at calculating the results of a very specific computational task. It's like crying because a hand mixer can beat eggs faster than any human can beat them by hand - there are many tasks that humans aren't the best at and there's nothing concerning about that.

Calculators have existed for a long time and they crush humans at doing arithmetic. I wouldn't cry if I watched a documentray where a calculator beats the best human at 5-digit-number multiplication. AlphaGo is like a big expensive calculator that's specialised to doing the calculation of how to play Go.

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understood and I understand. Documentary was edited beautifully and well done. It delivered the emotions it was edited for perfectly is all I'm saying. Hats off to the director.

However, having said that and we all know AI will have bugs and will very well take paths we couldn't have imagined. It isn't so comforting to think companies like Palantir making wrong profiles of you and autonomous driving running over people will all be possible. But may be we can delete racism, discrimination, prejudice? yeah.. probably not until humans are left out of the algo and let it self code itself up.

I'm just saying, the future will be interesting when emotions are put aside and people, places and things profiled in a manner totally unconventional today.

It's rather ironic that almost all of man's greatest discoveries were made accidently like vulcanization of rubber or post-it or even antibiotics.

Wondering what kind of future humanity will have where everything is done deliberately and unconditionally. No emotions, accidents or serenity at play.

Coincidently, my greatest finds in life were almost all accidently including the love of my life and my fav food. I would have never met her nor find my fav food if it wasn't for certain unforeseen accidents.

PS> It isn't possible like chess to precalculate Go strategies. The documentary proved that and the game itself dictates that.

You're throwing a lot of things out there and I really can't see a real connection between the Go documentary and all of this Palantir/no-prejudice/no-emotion/favorite-food talk.

Yup, you have a point. I'm just rambling. Seriously. I am.

A lot of insightfulness here. I think I'll just sit back and read.

Just hoping you all get a chance to see it. Just for a well done documentary if nothing else.

I like HN for this reason. A lot of very insightful people. Hard to get away with nonsense and I mean that in the sincerest way.

I think the point is that computers are conquering less and less obviously computation problems. At some point we ask ourselves, just what is human intelligence? And perhaps there is not much difference between computers and humans after all...

> And perhaps there is not much difference between computers and humans after all...

My point is that at the current state of technology the difference is so huge that it's almost inappropriate to use the term intelligence to describe both how humans think and what computers do.

"It's like crying because a hand mixer can beat eggs faster than any human can beat them by hand..."

How fast you can beat eggs depends on how much transferable practice you got as a teenager.

Your comment made me weep for humanity.

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