The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go
According to Google, 60 million Chinese watched the first game on Wednesday afternoon.
.. In the first game, Lee Sedol was caught off-guard. In the second, he was powerless.
.. Kwon even went so far as to say that he is now more aware of the potential for machines to break free from the control of humans, echoing words we’ve long heard from people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman. “There was an inflection point for all human beings,” he said of AlphaGo’s win. “It made us realize that AI is really near us—and realize the dangers of it too.”
.. Lee Sedol said that over the course of the four-hour match he never once felt in control. “Yesterday, I was surprised,” he said through an interpreter, referring to Game One. “But today I am speechless. If you look at the way the game was played, I admit, it was a very clear loss on my part. From the very beginning of the game, there was not a moment in time when I felt that I was leading.”
.. In the end, Lee Sedol said he felt that, unlike in Game One, AlphaGo made no real mistakes. Not one. “I really feel that AlphaGo played the near perfect game,”