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Garry Kasparov: The World Should Embrace Artificial Intelligence (bbc.com)
"Chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten at his game by a chess-playing AI," writes dryriver. "But he does not think that AI is a bad thing." From Kasparov's interview with the BBC:
"We have to start recognizing the inevitability of machines taking over more and more tasks that we used to do in the past. It's called progress. Machines replaced farm animals and all forms of manual labor, and now machines are about to take over more menial parts of cognition. Big deal. It's happening. And we should not be alarmed about it. We should just take it as a fact and look into the future, trying to understand how can we adjust."
Kasparov has given the issue a lot of thought -- last month he released a new book called Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. But he also says that the IBM machine that beat him "was anything but intelligent. It was as intelligent as your alarm clock. A very expensive one, a $10 million alarm clock, but still an alarm clock. Very poweful -- brute force, with little chess knowledge. But chess proved to be vulnerable to the brute force. it could be crunched once hardware got fast enough and databases got big enough and algorithms got smart enough."
Kasparov has given the issue a lot of thought -- last month he released a new book called Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. But he also says that the IBM machine that beat him "was anything but intelligent. It was as intelligent as your alarm clock. A very expensive one, a $10 million alarm clock, but still an alarm clock. Very poweful -- brute force, with little chess knowledge. But chess proved to be vulnerable to the brute force. it could be crunched once hardware got fast enough and databases got big enough and algorithms got smart enough."
Go was supposed to be a much tougher challenge, not expected to be dominated by machines for decades
I don't think many people keeping up with advances in machine learning were surprised. There were several teams working on Go, and they were making rapid progress. The hardware was also improving rapidly, and much more historical game data was available.
the pool of humans who are even capable of holding their own against AlphaGo has likely dropped to below 1000, out of 7 billion
No, the number is zero. No human will ever again beat the best Go program.
There will still be human Go tournaments, just like forklifts haven't done away with human weightlifting contests.
Current research is mostly centered on "weak AI", that is machines and algorithms that tackle a specific set of problems. As such, it cannot take over the world, but it can allow the elite/1%/whatever to get to the point where they no longer need other humans for anything.
Although the end result will likely be the same for you and me.
I don't think many people keeping up with advances in machine learning were surprised.
Most people even involved with Alpha Go were surprised at how quickly they were able to dominate human Go champions. From what I have read only Hassabis was confident they could do it in a few years. In most cases even AI researchers are often wrong about how quickly AI is getting better.
Humans are not very good at comprehending exponential increases in capability, even in their chosen fields. People have been spending too much time worrying about the end of Moore's law, and ignoring that exponential increase in algorithm performance has been much faster than even Moore's law.
There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars). But most things we think will take 100 years will probably take less than 20.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
These issues are very deep and potentiall deceptive. Even the cleverest of people can get hopelessly misled.
In Genna Sosonko's excellent book "Russian Silhouettes", a series of in-depth sketches of great chess players whom Sosonko knew personally, there is a very instructive anecdote about Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik, multiple world champion and considered the "father" of the mighty Soviet School of Chess.
As well as being a superb chess player - although an amateur by modern standards, as he strictly limited the time he devoted to the game - Botvinnik's "day job" was electrical engineering. He launched projects to study the potential of computers for a wide range of important types of work. Sosonko tells the following instructive story.
[Botvvinik declared that] "... to write a program for managing the economy is easier than for chess, because chess is a two-sided game, antagonistic. The players hinder each other, and the devil knows what that means, whereas in economics that is not the case, and everything is simpler".
It's not so often that one catches a world-class expert in such an utterly mistaken declaration. Today in 2017 computers play chess better than any human, but the problem of managing the economy is still not understood at all. And until it is understood, it cannot be programmed.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.