Artificial intelligence is scary, humans playing with fire

Last week there were two interesting incidents involving artificial intelligence (AI).

In both cases the company behind AI was Google. In Seoul, AlphaGo, an AI system created by Google, crushed Lee Sedol, an 18-time world champion who is regarded as the decade's top player of Go - an abstract strategy board game. In a match with five games, the AlphaGo was leading 3-0 on March 12.

On March 14, Sedol pulled one back and won the fourth game. He said that he had finally found a weakness in the AlphaGo's game. But apparently, the celebrations were premature. In the fifth game on March 15, AlphaGo again reigned supreme.

And this was not just one of those "AI-calculated-faster-than-a-human" type of victory. Go is an ancient game, invented by humans over 2,000 years ago. It is vastly more complex than chess and requires intuition. That an AI is now superior at Go - overwhelmingly and crushingly - is a big deal for better or worse.

The other incident happened in San Francisco, the city where Google's driverless cars are running. They are already very good at driving themselves, following the rules. But now they are trying to figure out the intuitive traffic moves that humans make - like making the eye contact with a fellow driver and yielding to a car on a broken traffic light. On March 9, one of the Google cars, scrapped a public bus, apparently because it thought it was ahead of the bus and hence had the right of way, just like a human driver would have thought.

The two incidents show AI is out of the purely arithmetic realm and is now moving into a space that until now only humans had occupied on earth. It is calculating, learning and then creating moves that are its own. This is why when in the second game against Sedol, AlphaGo made a move, Fan Hui, a Go player earlier defeated by AlphaGo, couldn't help but notice the uniqueness of it. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he told 'The Wired'. “So beautiful.”

While it sure is beautiful for now and most of us are marvelling at the AI we have developed, no one knows how the future is going to unfold when we will have machines capable of creating many more complex and unique moves, moves that would not be limited to drawing pictures of cats like the Google computers do now. Many hope the smart AI will make the life of humans much better. It can surely change the world in untold ways, making it more efficient and creating a better earth.

But as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla founder Elon Musk and scientist Stephen Hawking warn, it could also mean the end of humans. With AI in the driver's seat, it will be a brave new world and for now we don't know where we as humans will go from there.