AlphaGo, Machine Learning & the Future of AI

The following is a post I was certain I posted several months ago. I am perplexed as to how it came to be in my draft folder.

***

Go is an ancient Chinese board game that rapidly spread through South East Asia, that has gone on to find popularity across the world. Go is above all a game of patterns and a game of future thinking or more accurately imagined futures. Like Chess, Go is a game of movement, opportunity, combinations and permutations. But Go is far more complex, far richer and far more challenging than Chess. The world’s best Go players have now been beaten by an Artificial Intelligence that keeps beating previous versions of itself. The implications of this ground breaking achievement are far reaching and demonstrate just how significantly AI can alter the problem solving landscape and provide solutions to solutions to a huge array of challenges.

We can expect to see AI being used to find cures to cancers, carry out the most extensive deep space surveys, discover unfathomable numbers of Earth like planets and planets in the Goldlilocks Zone, solve countless engineering problems, find solutions to traffic congestion, fight wars at a distance, design and create countless new objects, forms, materials, chemical compounds and pharmaceutical drugs, track the majority of the human race from birth to death, monitor the online behaviour of everyone who uses the internet, monitor the purchases of every consumer, solve forensic riddles, catch criminals, solve mathematical puzzles, paradoxes and problems, create new mathematical axioms, rules and equations, solve complex mathematical problems, find and identify millions of newly discovered bacteria, map the Earth in ways previously unimagined, create, monitor and care for our own personal and family archives among countless other possible activities that it could be used for.

Whoever the person was who invented a game of moving coloured rocks around on a grid of lines several thousand years ago, they had no idea of how the game they invented would spiral outwards through time and space and influence other human beings to invent new self learning technologies that would one day utterly transform how we solve problems and what it is to be a human being. Similarly, none of us can know how we what we think, feel and do can go out into the world and effect people in other times and other places. And not just other people but other living beings. Who we are effects all of reality. Creating effects that none of can know, for better and/or worse. Just as moving a single white stone into an opponents territory, can change the entire course of a game and spell Life, Death or Atari.