Hey guys --
Machines won again.
A few weeks ago, AlphaGo, a program developed by Google defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol in four out of five matches in Go. Ken Jennings, the winningest player in Jeporady history said, "The nightmarish robot dystopias of science-fiction movies just got one benchmark closer."
Knowing all to well what it is to face a computer (he has lost head to head to IBM's Watson), he continues on to say, "...in a very real way, your opponent isn’t just a room full of servers or a few thousand lines of code. It’s the Future, the possibility that your own individual talent, the thing that’s made you special your whole life, can now be replaced by a sufficiently clever algorithm....I assume that Lee, like Kasparov and me before him, will eventually make it through the five stages of automation obsolescence and accept his pioneering role in the early history of “thinking” machines. But what about all those newly replaceable souls who come after us, in a seismic shift that seems about to reshape our entire economy? For now, it’s just a handful of chess and Go and Jeopardy! champions who no longer feel needed and useful. But what happens to society when it’s tens of millions of us?
Does AI give you hope? Or make you despair for our future? Read more from Ken's essay in Slate here.
I can't quite decide...what do you think?
Cheers,
Nidhi
