The 2016 Go match between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo sparked a surge of interest in artificial intelligence. As we explore the future of AI and how it will coexist with humans, we need to understand and prepare for the impact it will have on society.
On March 9, 2016, the Go match of the century between humans and computers began. The match was highly anticipated before it began, and most people (84-93% according to internet polls) favored Lee Sedol to win. But when the match actually started, people were shocked. When AlphaGo won the first game, people said, “Lee Sedol was caught off guard” and “AlphaGo is not at a level where it can beat Lee Sedol 九段 100%,” but after the second game, people said, “I don’t know what to say anymore. It was a complete defeat in terms of content,” Lee Sedol said in his own words. The final result was a 1:4 defeat for Lee Sedol. After the tournament ended, people were interested not only in Lee Sedol and the world of Go, but also in A.I.
One of the most talked about topics is the future of AI. AlphaGo and Lee Sedol’s match has been called “the battle between humans and AI.” In such a situation, AlphaGo’s victory naturally led people to speculate about the future of AI. Predictions range from exaggeratedly saying that AI will dominate humans like in the movies to realistically saying that AI will take away jobs from humans. In this essay, I’ll discuss two phenomena: why people are so interested in this big event, and what we can expect from the future of AI after the event.
AI: Why are we so excited about this obscure technology again?
AI has been around for a while now. Even technologies that seem new, like “deep learning,” are actually already used in our daily lives. For example, when you hover over a photo on Facebook, the name of the person in the photo automatically pops up, which is Facebook’s Deep Face technology that applies deep learning. AI is an old technology that has been in development for a long time, starting in the 1990s. Nevertheless, we have seen a huge amount of interest in the AI called AlphaGo in the era of Lee Sedol and AlphaGo.
This is because Google introduced AlphaGo in the form of a showdown. Google, Apple, and other tech companies have spent a lot of money to develop AI, but the level of AI we encounter in our daily lives is always disappointing. Apple’s Siri, for example, doesn’t talk to the machine, but rather fetches information from the input, and even then, it often doesn’t do what we want.
In the meantime, the best way to arouse the world’s interest in AI is not to analyze the level of AI and publish a paper, but to hold a competition with humans. In fact, even before the big match, there were articles stating that AlphaGo had an ELO of 3588, which is the second-best Go player in the world. However, despite this numerical analysis, the public opinion predicted Lee Sedol’s victory, and when Lee Sedol lost, they began to write articles about the fear of AI. This is a disparity from the analysis of A.I in everyday life that I mentioned earlier.
The reason for this analysis is that, as mentioned earlier, AlphaGo won the “showdown” with Lee Sedol, and this showdown is represented as a showdown between “AI” and “humans,” not just between a program and a human. And this seems to be Google’s marketing strategy. To draw people’s attention to their research, Google chose a time-tested battle against humans, and it worked very well indeed, as the real-world applications of AI are still technically far from being ready.
The future of artificial intelligence: how unpredictable it is
With every new technology, humans have been wary of how it will affect us. When home computers first appeared, when the internet first came out, a fair number of futurists predicted jobs that would be obsolete in 20 years. It’s now 20 years later, and accountants, who topped the list of jobs that would disappear, are still around, albeit in smaller numbers. Contrary to the predictions that computers would replace accountants’ calculations and eliminate the need for them to exist, accountants are still around because of the high-level analysis they provide. The same is true for actors. When Deep Blue beat the chess champion in the late 90s, futurists predicted that there would be no actors in the future and that cyber actors would emerge, and a company called Square believed this and invested heavily in the cyber actor market. Unfortunately, actors are still here (and have become more popular in recent years), and Square has since been merged. And interestingly, a recent paper by Oxford University professors Carl Frey and Michael Osborne ranked accountants second (94%) and actors 10th (37%) among the professions most likely to disappear in 20 years. Of course, we can’t be sure that this prediction is wrong. But what is certain is that futurists have already been wrong once before, when Deep Blue defeated a chess champion in the late 90s and the internet began to be commercialized, that artificial intelligence would soon transform human society.
As history has shown, the development of AI is likely to go in unpredictable directions. Whenever a new technology emerges, we either fear or look forward to the impact it will have on our lives, but we can’t easily predict how it will evolve and how it will affect our daily lives. The same is true for AI. While we need to be cautious and avoid the development of A.I. to become a “strong artificial intelligence” with a mind of its own, it doesn’t seem right to judge the future and fear A.I. blindly.
However, there is some validity to the view that the development of AI will inevitably lead to the disappearance of some jobs. Throughout history, the emergence of new technologies has led to the disappearance of some jobs and the creation of new ones. This is expected to be the case with AI. However, the speed and scope of these changes are difficult to predict, and the societal impacts will vary widely.
Conclusion: Exploring the coexistence of AI and humans
The development of artificial intelligence will undoubtedly bring about major changes in our society. To prepare for these changes, we need to understand and adapt to the advances in technology rather than fear them. It’s important to be open to different possibilities of how AI will change our lives, and to prepare social and economic measures accordingly.
Therefore, we should avoid excessive fear or unconditional optimism about the future of AI, and instead take a realistic view of how to coexist with it. This is a challenge for all of us, and we need to be proactive in dealing with the changes that the development of AI will bring.
Preparing for coexistence with AI is not just about technological advancements. It requires changes in education, policies, social structures, and more, and it’s something we all need to work together to create. To ensure that AI has a positive impact on our society, we must continue to learn, adapt, and drive change.
