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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.
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