It’s almost a year and a half since I wrote In Code we Trust. More recently, Tim Ferriss had Eric Schmidt on his podcast (transcript). In what I thought was a fascinating discussion based on the latter’s recent book The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, (coauthored with Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher), they also brought up AlphaGo. Go was a game that humans had been playing for 2,500 years, and it was thought to be incomputable until DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat world champions. As Schmidt explained, some of its moves and strategies were the kind no one had thought of before. In Kissinger’s words, we’re entering a new epoch, similar to the Renaissance, this age of artificial intelligence, because humanity has never had a competitive intelligence, similar to itself, but not human. To note, a more recent version – AlphaGo Zero self-taught itself without learning from human games, and surpassed its predecessor in 40 days!
(more…)