Rise of the Machines (AI)

This post is inspired by AlphaGo’s historic victory over Go Grandmaster Lee Sedol. The five-match series is now poised 3–1, with Lee scoring a consolation win in the fourth game. AlphaGo’s win is historic as to date, machines have beaten the best humans at chess and checkers and Othello and Jeopardy. But no machine has beaten our very best at Go, a game that is exponentially more complex than chess.

While Google & DeepMind rejoice in the success of AlphaGo, a perennial debate (and the theme of one of my favorite Scifi movie series — Terminator) of Man vs. Machine, surfaces yet again. I’ve always believed in the power of the human brain to acclimatize and learn faster than the machines created by us. But this win of AlphaGo’s, shakes up my belief forcing me to re-evaluate my stand and re-imagine our future. Following are my concerns -

1. Power struggle — As AlphaGo struck down one of our best, a sense of despair and a slight tinge of fear dawned upon several people like me around the world. Fan Hui, three-time European Go Champion, described one of AlphaGo’s match-winning moves as follows — “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move”. His description, although in awe, clearly portrays the super-human power (and mystery) that the AI technology holds. I am afraid that AI is growing in strength much more rapidly than an average human mind’s intelligence is, in which case, the future common man is at a loss against this all-pervasive super powerful technology. I’m starting to fear that AI is nearing the inflection point where its next path is extremely uncertain and the fears of AI taking over the world heightens as Elon Musk
2. Shift in control — Humans value control over all processes as they want to be certain of the outcome, which in turn enables them to be better prepared for any eventuality. Loss of this control to AI is my next fear, when AI gets better with decision-making and makes our decisions for us in ways that we are not perfectly aware of.
3. Loss of purpose — I believe that technology’s main purpose is to equip and enable the weakest of us to learn better, live better achieve greater things. But in case of AI, the technology causes a virtual knowledge divide between the developers of the technology and the users, polarizing the power and discounting the basic purpose of technology. To sum up, Machines should help us learn, but not teach us what to learn.

Ending this post on a rather dramatic note — We are not aware of what, when and how it will happen, but when it does happen, we better be prepared for the — ‘Rise of the Machines’.

P.S — Special thanks to Sandipan Chattopadhyay sir, Founder of Xelpmoc & ex-CTO of JustDial.