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DeepMind's Go-Playing AI Doesn't Need Human Help To Beat Us Anymore (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind has unveiled the latest version of its Go-playing software, AlphaGo Zero. The new program is a significantly better player than the version that beat the game's world champion earlier this year, but, more importantly, it's also entirely self-taught. DeepMind says this means the company is one step closer to creating general purpose algorithms that can intelligently tackle some of the hardest problems in science, from designing new drugs to more accurately modeling the effects of climate change. The original AlphaGo demonstrated superhuman Go-playing ability, but needed the expertise of human players to get there. Namely, it used a dataset of more than 100,000 Go games as a starting point for its own knowledge. AlphaGo Zero, by comparison, has only been programmed with the basic rules of Go. Everything else it learned from scratch. As described in a paper published in Nature today, Zero developed its Go skills by competing against itself. It started with random moves on the board, but every time it won, Zero updated its own system, and played itself again. And again. Millions of times over. After three days of self-play, Zero was strong enough to defeat the version of itself that beat 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol, winning handily -- 100 games to nil. After 40 days, it had a 90 percent win rate against the most advanced version of the original AlphaGo software. DeepMind says this makes it arguably the strongest Go player in history.
Never forget that the many of the people who did lose their jobs to industrialization died homeless of exposure and starvation after being put down by the military. They were provided neither training nor jobs on the new machines (which was their true issue).
Similarly, we could have a very rough 20 years where jobs are destroyed faster than they can be created and where workers over 50 (40?) can't afford train for the new jobs and there are more unemployed than society is willing to pay for (even tho our productivity is 100x what it was a hundred years ago so one worker should be able to completely support 99 unemployed with 200 square feet of living space and basic food).
It's coming. It could be better but it's probably going to be bad. Possibly even "great depression" or "financial panic of 18xx" bad. (they had a lot of financial panics in the 1800s that were pretty terrible.).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.