Tech Update: Google Unleashes Self Learning AI

AI is advancing by leaps and bounds and to prove my point, a new system called AlphaGo Zero only three days to master the game of Go, a Chinese board game that people dedicate their lives to learning in China. What's even more impressive is that it did this all without the help of human intervention!

Google’s artificial intelligence group, DeepMind, has unveiled the latest incarnation of its Go-playing program, AlphaGo – an AI so powerful that it derived thousands of years of human knowledge of the game before inventing better moves of its own, all in the space of three days.

Named AlphaGo Zero, the AI program has been hailed as a major advance because it mastered the ancient Chinese board game from scratch, and with no human help beyond being told the rules. In games against the 2015 version, which famously beat Lee Sedol, the South Korean grandmaster, AlphaGo Zero won 100 to 0.

This is suprisingly alarming considering the way in which technology is rapidly replacing humans proving to be a cheaper alternative to human labor.

Perhaps we look at technology too harshly because in the right hands it has the power to transform a society into a magnificently productive and progressive state. In the wrong hands it could have effects that will forever scar humanity's potential for evolution.

While AlphaGo Zero is a step towards a general-purpose AI, it can only work on problems that can be perfectly simulated in a computer, making tasks such as driving a car out of the question. AIs that match humans at a huge range of tasks are still a long way off, Hassabis said. More realistic in the next decade is the use of AI to help humans discover new drugs and materials, and crack mysteries in particle physics. “I hope that these kinds of algorithms and future versions of AlphaGo-inspired things will be routinely working with us as scientific experts and medical experts on advancing the frontier of science and medicine,” Hassabis said.

Clearly there will still be a use for human labor until newer more advanced forms of AI are developed which are able to learn from other sources beyond computer simulations.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think AI is moving in a humane and useful direction? What potential benefits and disadvantages can you see in the continued development of AI?

Please leave thoughts and comments below.

Thanks for reading!

Source:

'It's able to create knowledge itself': Google unveils AI that learns on its own - The Guardian