The biggest mistake I could make when writing this book would be to do it with only a Western view of the state of the art.
What Deep Blue achieved by defeating Garry Kasparov in a chess match using brute force[145] in 1997 is relatively little compared to what Alpha Go, from DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014[146], achieved by defeating the world champion of Go using deep learning.
Go, an ancient game originating from Chinese culture, may sound unfamiliar to a Westerner. For the Asian community, on the other hand, the event between Alpha Go and Lee Se-Dol in 2016 was watched live by more than 200 million Asian viewers, who were becoming witnesses to the advancement of AI.
The result is history, Alpha Go won. But what is Go in the first place? Go is famous for being more complex than chess, with a larger board and more pieces, leading to more complex games. The team behind the development of Alpha Go boasts that there are more than 10¹⁷⁰ possible board combinations in Go, while scientific studies estimate that there are only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe[147].
During the five Go games between Lee Se-Dol and Alpha Go, the expert commentators covering the event were left speechless on more than one occasion. The sadness they felt watching their idol, the best humanity had to offer in that field, defeated by a machine devoid of feelings, without even knowing its achievements, was devastating for the general public. There were moments when Lee Se-Dol’s astonishment and bewilderment perfectly conveyed a set of emotions so encompassing that in just one expression, one could admire his awe and respect for the move he had just witnessed, along with the horror and the feeling that he was finished. All that in one expression. At times, he was even seen looking up to observe his opponent, but AlphaGo is just a program running on a computer. Every time Se-Dol looked up, in front of him he saw Aja Huang, a scientist from DeepMind, who moved the pieces on the board according to AlphaGo’s instructions. Huang didn’t think about the moves; he just replicated them on the board without any emotion, so Se-dol couldn’t do something as simple as exchanging feelings with his opponent through eye contact. AlphaGo may be extremely intelligent, but it was not aware of its achievement.
If you want to learn more about Go, Alpha Go, and Lee Se-Dol, here is the official documentary by DeepMind, the company behind this technology. You can watch the full movie for free on the company’s YouTube channel:
Alpha Go Movie[148]
Shortly after his defeat by Alpha Go, despite his subsequent victories against other people, Se-Dol retired from the profession. It is possible that after dedicating his entire life to Go and finally discovering that there was a superior entity that could not be defeated, feelings of disillusionment and loss of purpose took over him.
Alpha Go then defeated Ke Jie in 2017 and Shin Jin-seo, the best Go player today, in 2019. Did it put them out of work? Not necessarily, but just as this AI was able to do the job of these great professionals better, Artificial Intelligence will increasingly come to the offices, businesses, and factories near you. As the coexistence with AI and its integration into our lives progresses, we may stop seeing Lee Se-Dol’s retirement as something related to what we understand by AI or where we believe it can go, but rather as a question of how we perceive ourselves.
[145] It is a technique used in computing to find a user’s password by trial and error, trying all possible combinations of characters one at a time, or using a predefined glossary of possible passwords to try.
[146] Shu, C. (2014). Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind For More Than $ 500M. TechCrunch. Visto el 9 de diciembre del 2022, en https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind.
[147] AlphaGo. (2015). Deepmind.com. Visto el 27 de enero del 2023, en https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/alphago.
[148] AlphaGo – The Movie | Full award-winning documentary. YouTube. (2020). Visto el 19 de junio del 2021, en https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y.