From the New York Times, July 10:
Lee Saedol was one of the world’s top Go players, and his shocking loss to an A.I. opponent was a harbinger of a new, unsettling era. “It may not be a happy ending,” he says.
Lee Saedol was the finest Go player of his generation when he suffered a decisive loss, defeated not by a human opponent but by artificial intelligence.
Mr. Lee was beaten by AlphaGo, an A.I. computer program developed by Google’s DeepMind unit. The stunning upset, in 2016, made headlines around the world and looked like a clear sign that artificial intelligence was entering a new, profoundly unsettling era.
By besting Mr. Lee, an 18-time world champion revered for his intuitive and creative style of play, AlphaGo had solved one of computer science’s greatest challenges: teaching itself the abstract strategy needed to win at Go, widely considered the world’s most complex board game.
“I am very surprised because I have never thought I would lose,” Mr. Lee said at the time in a post-match news conference. “I didn’t know that AlphaGo would play such a perfect Go.”
But the implications of his loss went far beyond the game itself, in which two players compete for territory by placing black and white stones on a gridded board made up of 19 lines by 19 lines. AlphaGo’s victory demonstrated the unbridled potential of A.I. to achieve superhuman mastery of skills once considered too complicated for machines.
Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.
“Losing to A.I., in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times.
As society wrestles with what A.I. holds for humanity’s future, Mr. Lee is now urging others to avoid being caught unprepared, as he was, and to become familiar with the technology now. He delivers lectures about A.I., trying to give others the advance notice he wishes he had received before his match.
“I faced the issues of A.I. early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”
Since his loss, Mr. Lee has become an A.I. obsessive of sorts, following with rapt if uneasy attention as artificial intelligence delivers one breakthrough after another.
A.I. has helped chatbots carry on conversations almost indistinguishable from human interaction. It has solved problems that have confounded scientists for decades like predicting protein shapes. And it has blurred the lines of creativity: writing music, producing art and generating videos.
Mr. Lee is not a doomsayer. In his view, A.I. may replace some jobs, but it may create some, too. When considering A.I.’s grasp of Go, he said it was important to remember that humans both created the game and designed the A.I. system that mastered it.
What he worries about is that A.I. may change what humans value.
“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”....
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