Zach WeinersmithMaybe I'm just crazy, but I feel like there is not enough freaking out going on vis-a-vis recent AI developments. It seems to me science, the arts, transportation, engineering... everything is going to be changed, if not in 10 years certainly in 30. It feels to me like there's a lot of denial going on, of the form "well, it can't do [this one thing]" but that was said about chess programs in the 90s. They're now absolutely unbeatable.
Alex Knapp@ZachWeinersmith Well what's interesting about chess is that the brute force programs from the 90s/early aughts were devastating, but the new ML engines are changing the way people play because they develop strategies versus just tactical calculation. Chess has changed a lot in the past few years as a result and helped bolster human creativity in the game.
@ZachWeinersmith I think there's a lot of room for complementarity between human and AI creative processes.
@thealexknapp Yeah, and part of what interests me is people are still interested in playing and watching chess, even though the computer is better. Maybe this is just a result of being in the arts, which are very pyramid-shaped in terms of who gets success, but it surprises me a game like chess still persists this way even though humans are outmoded.
@ZachWeinersmith They should program fatigue into the ML algorithms to make it fair!
Seriously, though, one interesting thing about the Go ML engines is that it was beating masters because it discovered a line of strategy that, in hundreds of years of playing, no human had come up with! So now people are playing around with this whole new thing.
@ZachWeinersmith In a best case scenario, I can imagine we kind of evolve with AI like they do in Star Trek The Next Generation - where there's just like a bunch of back and forth brainstorming with the computer and people pursue outmoded arts for the hell of it and you've got random weirdos who memorize baseball stats and simulate games in their head for fun...
@thealexknapp Agree, but how we get from here to there is quiiiite a mystery.
@ZachWeinersmith No mystery! We get going on Sanctuary Districts. Then the Bell Riots. Then World War III, followed by the Post-Atomic Horror.
If we get through that it's smooth sailing to April 5, 2063 and First Contact with the Vulcans.
That leads to the development of the New World Economy and the eventual disappearance of poverty and hunger on Earth. No prob.
@ZachWeinersmith (oh and somewhere in there we have to fight off Col. Green and his ecoterrorist genocide campaign but I forget exactly where in the timeline that happens.)