ed AlphaGo lessons

Race is on to find best ways of harnessing AI

Cheers to Lee Se-dol for achieving his first win over AlphaGo.

Korea’s go world champion deserves a pat on the back for overcoming a great deal of pressure fighting against the machine on behalf of humankind and enduring heartburn for his failure to prevail in the game in which he is the best.

Still, it should be remembered that his victory came in the fourth game of the five-game series, being irrelevant in the overall outcome after Google software’s sweep of the first three games.

Setting aside the public relations (PR) elements in the U.S. tech firm’s circus of grandeur, there are a couple of lessons to be learned in our task of determining the path forward in our relations between humans and the later generations of AlphaGo.

Above all, Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, the developer of AlphaGo and a Google subsidiary, was right when he said in a recent lecture here that the machine plays the role of helper for humans. His comments were both a personal rebuttal of doomsayers who are spewing fears of the machines’ subjugation of humans and a confession that the machines are merely in their infancy.

Plainly, AlphaGo should wait until many generations later to see its offspring play the role of Helen for the sci-fi franchise Iron Man, the mission of which is to make available information for its master, Tony Stark, and forewarn him of incoming dangers.

To borrow further from movies and novels, there are by and large three stages of serious AI ― from Stark’s supercomputer maid Helen, then to Andrew in Issac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man, who is so eager to be like man and, finally, Skynet, the super-intelligent computer system in The Terminator series that wages war against humans. Put in this perspective, it is easy to see how rudimentary Google’s master go player is.

For those who still feel spooky about AlphGo, just remember that it can’t even make its moves without the help of humans. In other words, it only has a brain that is really composed of an array of supercomputers and a limited memory cloud, being under the care of Google’s best minds. A simple piece of advice for the faint-of-heart is not to see too much into sci-fi and don’t believe everything in movies and books.

Perhaps of more relevant concern is the loss of jobs, the humans being who are being replaced by machines. Now that a worldwide slump is still dragging on, people naturally tend to see AlphaGo with concern rather than with confidence. Doomsayers are adding to the mix, foretelling that robots and AI will spell a major economic upheaval on the proportion of the Great Depression. This scenario may sound easy to believe, especially when read into the context of the current economic hard times.

But it is important to remember that humankind has endured many great changes before and successfully adapted to them and prevailed. For instance, few understood the eventual magnitude of the Industrial Revolution in its incipient stages but it is worth looking at what has taken place. Humans have harnessed the power of machines and are enjoying the benefits (some nuisances) they have generated.

Now is the time that we, the humans, should take heart, throw caution to the wind and embrace the winds of change coming on the cusp of the surging power of artificial intelligence to revolutionize the way we live for the better.

A footnote for Google: thanks for helping turn public attention to the area that may determine humankind’s future and good luck. Our advice is that when the next refinement in AI arrives, Google should explain in the fine print that this too is a human invention so as to leave little dispute about the outcome.