# News flash: Super AI is coming.



## TrueorFalse248 (Dec 16, 2019)

In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer developed by IBM, beat Garry Kasparov, the world’s best chess player. It was a watershed moment in the history of computing, a seismic event that shook many people’s understanding of technology, intelligence, and humanity. But today, it is but a quaint memory: of course a computer would beat the world champion at chess. Why wouldn’t it? Since the beginning of computing, chess has been a favorite means to test artificial intelligence.

That’s because chess possesses a near-infinite number of permutations: there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe. In any board position, if one looks only three or four moves ahead, there are already hundreds of millions of variations. For a computer to match a human player, not only must it be capable of calculating an incredible number of possible outcomes, but it must also have solid algorithms to help it decide what’s worth calculating. Put another way: to beat a human player, a computer’s Thinking Brain, despite being vastly superior to a human’s, must be programmed to evaluate more/less valuable board positions—that is, the computer must have a modestly powerful “*Feeling Brain*” programmed into it.

Since that day in 1997, computers have continued to improve at chess at a staggering rate. Over the following fifteen years, the top human players regularly got pummeled by chess software, sometimes by embarrassing margins. Today, it’s not even close. Kasparov himself recently joked that the chess app that comes installed on most smartphones “is far more powerful than Deep Blue was.”

These days, chess software developers hold tournaments for their programs to see whose algorithms come out on top. Humans are not only excluded from these tournaments, but they’d likely not even
place high enough for it to matter anyway. The undisputed champion of the chess software world for the past few years has been an opensource program called Stockfish. Stockfish has either won or been the runner-up in almost every significant chess software tournament since 2014. A collaboration between half a dozen lifelong
chess software developers, Stockfish today represents the pinnacle of chess logic. Not only is it a
chess engine, but it can analyze any game, any position, giving grandmaster-level feedback within
seconds of each move a player makes. Stockfish was happily going along being the king of the computerized chess mountain, being the gold standard of all chess analysis worldwide, until 2018, when Google showed up to the party.
*Then shit got weird.*
*Google has a program called AlphaZero*. It’s not chess software. It’s artificial intelligence (AI)
software. Instead of being programmed to play chess or another game, the software is programmed tolearn—and not just chess, but any game. Early in 2018, Stockfish faced off against Google’s AlphaZero. On paper, it was not even close to a fair fight. AlphaZero can calculate “only” eighty thousand board positions per second. Stockfish?

Seventy million. In terms of computational power, that’s like me entering a footrace against a Formula One race car. But it gets even weirder: the day of the match, *AlphaZero didn’t even know how to play chess*.
Yes, that’s right—before its match with the best chess software in the world, AlphaZero had less than a day to learn chess from scratch. The software spent most of the day running simulations of chess games against itself, learning as it went. It developed strategies and principles the same way a human would: through trial and error. Imagine the scenario. You’ve just learned the rules of chess, one of the most complex games on the planet. You’re given less than a day to mess around with a board and figure out some strategies. And from there, your first game ever will be against the world champion. Good luck.

Yet, somehow, AlphaZero won. Okay, it didn’t just win. AlphaZero smashed Stockfish. Out of one
hundred games, AlphaZero won or drew every single game. Read that again: a mere nine hours after learning the rules to chess, AlphaZero played the best chess-playing entity in the world and did not drop a single game out of one hundred. It was a result so unprecedented that people still don’t know what to make of it. Human grandmasters marveled at the creativity and ingenuity of AlphaZero. One, Peter Heine Nielsen, gushed, “I always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and showed us how they play chess. I feel now I
know.”

When AlphaZero was done with Stockfish, it didn’t take a break. Pf t, please! Breaks are for frail
humans. Instead, as soon as it had finished with Stockfish, AlphaZero began teaching itself the
strategy game Shogi. Shogi is often referred to as Japanese chess, but many argue that it’s more complex than chess.

Whereas Kasparov lost to a computer in 1997, top Shogi players didn’t begin to lose to computers until 2013. Either way, AlphaZero destroyed the top Shogi software (called “Elmo”), and by a similarly astounding margin: in one hundred games, it won ninety, lost eight, and drew two. Once again, AlphaZero’s computational powers were far less than Elmo’s. (In this case, it could calculate forty thousand moves per second compared to Elmo’s thirty-five million.) And once again, AlphaZero hadn’t even known how to play the game the previous day.

In the morning, it taught itself two infinitely complex games. And by sundown, it had dismantled
the best-known competition on earth.

News flash: AI is coming. And while chess and Shogi are one thing, as soon as we take AI out of the board games and start putting it in the board rooms . . . well, you and I and everyone else will probably find ourselves out of a job.

Already, AI programs have invented their own languages that humans can’t decipher, become more effective than doctors at diagnosing pneumonia, and even written passable chapters of Harry Potter fan fiction. At the time of this writing, we’re on the cusp of having self-driving cars, automated legal advice, and even computer-generated art and music.

Slowly but surely, AI will become better than we are at pretty much everything: medicine,engineering, construction, art, technological innovation. You’ll watch movies created by AI, and discuss them on websites or mobile platforms built by AI, moderated by AI, and it might even turn out that the “person” you’ll argue with will be an AI. But as crazy as that sounds, it’s just the beginning. Because here is where the bananas will really hit the fan: the day an AI can write AI software better than we can. When that day comes, when an AI can essentially spawn better versions of itself, at will, then buckle your seatbelt, amigo, because it’s going to be a wild ride and we will no longer have control over where we’re going. AI will reach a point where its intelligence outstrips ours by so much that we will no longer comprehend what it’s doing. Cars will pick us up for reasons we don’t understand and take us to locations we didn’t know existed. We will unexpectedly receive medications for health issues we didn’t know we suffered from. It’s possible that our kids will switch schools, we will change jobs, economic policies will abruptly shift, governments will rewrite their constitutions—and none of us will comprehend the full reasons why. It will just happen. Our Thinking Brains will be too slow, and our Feeling Brains too erratic and dangerous. Like AlphaZero inventing chess strategies in mere hours that chess’s greatest minds could not anticipate, advanced AI could reorganize society and all our places within it in ways we can’t imagine. Then, we will end up right back where we began: worshipping impossible and unknowable forces that seemingly control our fates. Just as primitive humans prayed to their gods for rain and flame—the same way they made sacrifices, offered gifts, devised rituals, and altered their behavior and appearance to curry favor with the naturalistic gods—so will we. But instead of the primitive gods, we will offer ourselves up to the AI gods. We will develop superstitions about the algorithms. If you wear this, the algorithms will favor you. If you wake at a certain hour and say the right thing and show up at the right place, the machines will bless you with great fortune. If you are honest and you don’t hurt others and you take care of yourself and your family, the AI gods will protect you.

The old gods will be replaced by the new gods: the algorithms. And in a twist of evolutionary irony, the same science that killed the gods of old will have built the gods of new. There will be a great return to religiosity among mankind. And our religions won’t necessarily be so different from the religions of the ancient world—after all, our psychology is fundamentally evolved to deify what it doesn’t understand, to exalt the forces that help or harm us, to construct systems of values around our experiences, to seek out conflict that generates hope.
Why would AI be any different?

Our AI gods will understand this, of course. And either they will find a way to “upgrade” our brains out of our primitive psychological need for continuous strife, or they will simply manufacture artificial strife for us. We will be like their pet dogs, convinced that we are protecting and fighting for our territory at all costs but, in reality, merely peeing on an endless series of digital fire hydrants. this may frighten you. This may excite you. Either way, it is likely inevitable. Power emerges from the ability to manipulate and process information, and we always end up worshipping whateverhas the most power over us.

So, allow me to say that I, for one, welcome our AI overlords. I know, that’s not the final religion you were hoping for. But that’s where you went wrong: hoping. Don’t lament the loss of your own agency. If submitting to artificial algorithms sounds awful, understand this: you already do. And you like it.
The algorithms already run much of our lives. The route you took to work is based on an algorithm. Many of the friends you talked to this week? Those conversations were based on an algorithm. The gift you bought your kid, the amount of toilet paper that came in the deluxe pack, the fifty cents in savings you got for being a rewards member at the supermarket—all the result ofalgorithms.

We need these algorithms because they make our lives easier. And so will the algorithm gods of the near future. And as we did with the gods of the ancient world, we will rejoice in and give thanks to them. Indeed, it will be impossible to imagine life without them. These algorithms make our lives better. They make our lives more efficient. They make us more efficient.That’s why, as soon as we cross over, there’s no going back. *See Source for full info:Everything Is F*cked By Mark Manson*


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## Eren Jaegerbomb (Nov 13, 2015)

Dear goodness help us all.


(Man he retired? He didn't stay for long :sad


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## Fennel (Jan 11, 2017)

Sad about him retiring...


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## VSkyburn (Sep 30, 2018)

If it develops enough, Super AI might be able to write coherent forum posts. Maybe I'm an AI now, and you don't know it...


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## ShirleyDubois (Feb 20, 2020)

It can help us to solve all problems?


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## dulcinea (Aug 22, 2011)

Just like all computing technology, ai is really just a tool. It's a more advanced tool than what we've ever interacted with in the past, but a tool nonetheless.
When AI singularity happens, there's no real way of knowing how it can impact human civilization; I'm not entirely convinced that the economic impact would be 100% negative, and that it would head entirely in the direction of job losses. However, it can create such an unpredictable economy so as to make it difficult to have a stable presence within it. One of the most essential variables to consider is who is going to have access to much of the ai technology, or at the very least have the ability to monetize this tool. If it can be distributed democratically, than the average person can use it to predict stock market trends, start companies with the equivalent several hundred employees who don't have to get paid, and other such things in order to potentially even the odds. It could, in that sense, have a similar effect to the emergence of crypto-currency and blockchain.

However, if elitists pass regulations that make it difficult for the average person to monetize the use of AI, then the negative net effects projected because much more realistic.


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## bewerent (Jul 23, 2021)

AI is a most interesting topic. There's a lot of discussion about it. Some say it is the undoing of humanity, and others are on the other side. I am on the side that AI would be an advancement for society, like a super-brain that could control and reproduce everything. For example, in the same news, AI will be able to store an archive of information and will be able to analyze the situation in the world or country very quickly. For example, the now sensational story of disgraced politician derek fildebrandt. It will analyze each news item and make a more accurate conclusion about the situation than human guesses.


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