DeepMind’s journey chronicles the chase for AGI, the new fire destined to reshape civilization. From the digital sandboxes of Atari and the ancient silence of Go, its self-taught learning machines rose, proving that true general intelligence could be birthed from scratch.
As the AGI “boulder accelerates down the hill,” the film is an urgent call: the thinking game is won, but the moral stewardship of this boundless new power has just begun.
We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.
We are fucked.
Poignant documentary about the Lee Sedol versus the machine.
The symmetry of these two moves is more beautiful than anything else. One-in-ten-thousand and one-in-ten-thousand. This is what we should all take away from these astounding seven days. Hassabis and Silver and their fellow researchers have built a machine capable of something super-human. But at the same time, it’s flawed. It can’t do everything we humans can do. In fact, it can’t even come close. It can’t carry on a conversation. It can’t play charades. It can’t pass an eighth grade science test. It can’t account for God’s Touch.
But think about what happens when you put these two things together. Human and machine. Fan Hui will tell you that after five months of playing match after match with AlphaGo, he sees the game completely differently. His world ranking has skyrocketed. And apparently, Lee Sedol feels the same way. Hassabis says that he and the Korean met after Game Four, and that Lee Sedol echoed the words of Fan Hui. Just these few matches with AlphaGo, the Korean told Hassabis, have opened his eyes.
This isn’t human versus machine. It’s human and machine. Move 37 was beyond what any of us could fathom. But then came Move 78. And we have to ask: If Lee Sedol hadn’t played those first three games against AlphaGo, would he have found God’s Touch? The machine that defeated him had also helped him find the way.
His obnoxiousness stands out even more in this crowd, which seems to skew introverted and mild-mannered. Nobody’s exactly competing for stage time with Lau’s antics. But as uncomfortable as everyone appears to be with his shtick, they also seem to understand his point. After all, these people do puzzles for fun and overwhelmingly do financial modeling for work. For all the fun art projects and life-tracking stuff that everyday people do in Excel, the true customers for these tools are the money guys. The ones who used the advent of the spreadsheet to turn Wall Street into a global industry, that built wildly complicated things like collateralized debt obligations and helped usher in a financial crisis in 2008. The world may not run on spreadsheets, but spreadsheets run the world. Maybe all Lau is doing is saying the quiet part out loud, which is surprisingly uneasy in a room full of finance professionals.
As far as I can remember, every kids I know of started drawing by sketching Dragon Ball characters—somewhere at home or at school—out of boredom for our mortal world. And so did I and so did my nephews…
さようなら, l’artiste.
The only relevant piece I could find on the man and his creation, from Writers Write :
Toriyama’s world lives and dies on a sense of fun and a welling up of adventurous spirit. The artwork feels effortless yet controlled. The story feels like an unfolding mystery that could go on forever.
Toriyama thrives on chaos. His world is so random and colourful. It contains elements of magic science and religion that should not go together. However, the light-hearted nature of that reality allows it all to blend together into a seamless free flowing narrative.
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Not to delve into Roland Barthes’ Death Of The Author, but Toriyama’s indifference to meaning and story really created a world that people could project their own fantasies onto.
Very much like Star Wars, Dragon Ball is a place that you could see yourself living in. Apart from the various universe ending threats that always seem to get dealt with just in time, it seems almost like a utopia.
Abnormal Capitalist 