AlphaGo Is Not AI
The piece really makes the only point worth making in the beginning:<p>&gt; What is AI and what is not AI is, to some extent, a matter of definition.<p>It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI. It just happens to solve one very specific problem very well, making it a weak AI.<p>&gt; Again, the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go are very good news because they could lead to lots of really useful applications in medical research, industry, environmental preservation, and many other areas. But this is only one part of the problem, as I’ve tried to show here. I don’t believe deep learning is the silver bullet that will get us to true AI, in the sense of a machine that is able to learn to live in the world, interact naturally with us, understand deeply the complexity of our emotions and cultural biases, and ultimately help us to make a better world.<p>The piece was written at a time when the world was much more interested in what AlphaGo was doing and once again people were perhaps getting too excited about AI, but it really doesn&#x27;t hold much value today. It may have been good to extinguish some of the misguided enthusiasm people were exhibiting back then, but no one is even talking about AlphaGo at the moment and there is little to no value in discussing what it means for strong AI anymore.