Here’s Yr Future

Here’s an update to this post about the heroic efforts of Lee Se-dol, a Korean go grand-master, to defeat the nefarious Google algorithm AlphaGo.

Alas, Mr. Lee got housed four matches to one.  From Wired:

“This week saw the end of the historic matchbetween Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best Go players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent system designed by a team of researchers at DeepMind, a London AI lab now owned by Google. The machine claimed victory in the best-of-five series, winning four games and losing only one. It marked the first time a machine had beaten the very best at this ancient and enormously complex game—a feat that, until recently,experts didn’t expect would happen for another ten years.

The victory is notable because the technologies at the heart of AlphaGo are the future. They’re already changing Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Twitter, and they’re poised to reinvent everything from robotics to scientific research. This is scary for some. The worry is that artificially intelligent machines will take our jobs and maybe even break free from our control—and on some level, those worries are healthy. We won’t be caught by surprise.”

I dunno.  If I get me a jet-pack and a sex robot out of all this I’m OK with it.