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The acronym AI traditionally stood for artificial intelligence. But I think it’s more accurate to think about it as an acronym for alien intelligence. Because artificial, it gives the impression that this is an artifact that we create and control. And AI with every passing year, AI is becoming less and less artificial and more and more alien in the sense that we can’t predict what kind of new stories and ideas and strategies it will come up with. It thinks, it behaves in a fundamentally alien way.
The Case of AlphaGo
This is not just theory. We are seeing it all around us. One of the key moments in the AI revolution back in 2016 was when AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, the world champion, at the game of Go. Go is a strategy board game, much more complex than chess, invented more than two thousand years ago in China, and it became a cultural treasure in East Asia. For more than two thousand years, tens of millions of people in East Asia played Go. And entire schools of thought, entire philosophies evolved around this game because it was seen as a mirror for life. People thought, we know how to play Go. And AlphaGo taught itself how to play Go. And within a few weeks, surpassed the wisdom accumulated by humanity, by tens of millions of people over more than two thousand years.
The most amazing thing about its victory was that it used a strategy which was considered beyond the pale. When it played its crucial moves, Go experts didn’t understand, what is it? Nobody plays Go like that. And it turned out to be a brilliant strategy. And it also turned out that for more than two thousand years, our human minds have explored only a very limited part of the landscape of Go. If you imagine all the ways you can play Go as a kind of planet with a geography. So humans were stuck on one island in the planet Go for more than two thousand years because human minds just couldn’t conceive of going beyond this small island. And then AI came along, and within a very brief time, it discovered entire new continents on the planet Go. And this is likely to happen in more and more fields. In finance, in art, in politics, in religion.
A New Entity
Understand the immense importance of what is happening right now. Throughout history, for tens of thousands of years, we lived cocooned inside a cultural world constructed by the human imagination. Now, for the first time in history, there is another entity, there is another agent out there that can create. Just think what it would mean to live on a planet which is increasingly shaped by the stories and the products of an alien intelligence.