Robots

Killer Robots? Lost Jobs?

The recent win of AlphaGo over Lee Sedol—one of the world’s highest ranked Go players—has resurfaced concerns about artificial intelligence. Yes, IBM Deep Blue’s win over chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997 and IBM Watson’s 2011 Jeopardy! victory over the two highest-earning champions had a similar effect, but this time the win comes after a year full of warnings about impending changes to our lives and society, good and bad, that will result from artificial intelligence. We have heard about A.I. stealing jobs, killer robots, algorithms that help diagnose and cure cancer, competent self-driving cars, perfect poker players, and more. It seems that for every mention of A.I. as humanity’s top existential risk, there is a mention of its power to solve humanity’s biggest challenges. Demis Hassabis—founder of Google DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo—views A.I. as “potentially a meta-solution to any problem,” and Eric Horvitz—director of research at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, lab—claims that “A.I. will be incredibly empowering to humanity.”