This is a legendary moment indeed! The world’s most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence has managed to defeat world’s top player of the ancient Chinese board game.
AlphaGo, an AI developed by Google-owned British company DeepMind, has beaten world-class player Lee Se-dol for a fourth time to win the five-game series 4-1 overall.
Why it such a big deal?
This win marks a major milestone in Artificial Intelligence research. While, over the years, machines have beaten humans at various games but this particular Chinese board game had long been considered impossible for computers to crack owing to its complexity.
So, DeepMind went one step ahead and used even more complex and nuanced machine learning and neural networks to give its AlphaGo AI the ability to evaluate and execute strategy at a world-class level. And we all know the results!
So what does this mean for the future of Artificial Intelligence?
The upside
For this game of Go, the deep-learning technology that AI used has concrete potential to revolutionize everything and in future its principles can very well be applicable to real-world problems, believe scientists.
Talking to LA Times, Tuomas Sandholm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University says that all these things have real-world applications. He further explains,
In complete information games, AI can help people search through large databases and do calculations and modeling. In incomplete information games, it can be used in situations where there are lots of unknown factors, such as negotiations, cybersecurity and auctions, and even in planning medical treatment.
The Google unit which is credited for developing this system also reiterates the fact that these machine-learning techniques will be useful in robotics, smartphone assistant systems and healthcare.
And the downside:
One of the key parts of artificial intelligence is intuition and equipping AI with this individualistic human trait can be revolutionary. Machines that can think like human beings would mean that in future they will be able to take on much of the work that is done by us. So, while this will have far-reaching effects, this also might mean that they will take on our jobs rendering us unemployed.
In this context, famed British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had made an interesting comment,
“Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
But you don’t have to worry about that as of now because AI has made its foray but still has a long way to go.