AlphaGo Defeats Ke Jie – The Future of Creativity and Artificial Intelligence
That’s how the New York Times article on AlphaGo defeating Chinese Go Grandmaster Ke Jie began. A year after AlphaGo’s convincing victory of Lee Sedol in Seoul, DeepMind’s artificial intelligence software also brought the world’s number one player to his knees.
Considering Mr. Ke’s public remarks before that AlphaGo can’t beat him, this victory adds more fuel to the public fear that artificial intelligence will begin to replace human labor in more aspects of life.
But putting dystopian fears and universal basic income discussions aside, AlphaGo’s victory provided a glimpse at the future of creativity, a future driven by machine intelligence.
Perhaps blinded by the effects of automation as a result of the growing adoption of machine intelligence, we often forget the promise and potential of artificial intelligence: the ability to extract and discover new knowledge. One understated achievement of AlphaGo is proving that machines can, in fact, be creative. See the following excerpts from NYT and DeepMind’s coverage of the event [emphasis mine]: Read more…
