Humans have been taking a beating from computers lately. The 4-1 defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Se-Dol by Google’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence (AI) is only the latest in a string of pursuits in which technology has triumphed over humanity.
Self-driving cars are already less accident-prone than human drivers, the TV quiz show Jeopardy! is a lost cause, and in chess humans have fallen so woefully behind computers that a recent international tournament was won by a mobile phone.
There is a real sense that this month’s human vs AI Go match marks a turning point. Go has long been held up as requiring levels of human intuition and pattern recognition that should be beyond the powers of number-crunching computers.
AlphaGo’s win over one of the world’s best players has reignited fears over the pervasive application of deep learning and AI in our future—fears famously expressed by Elon Musk as “our greatest existential threat.”
