Why AlphaGo Is Such a Big Deal
Reading this article I find myself thinking again how unhappy I am that
a neural network won Go. I am unhappy because neural networks are not smart. They&#x27;re
the epitome of artificial stupidity: they learn, but they don&#x27;t understand
anything that they learn. They can&#x27;t take what they learned and apply it to another
domain, not without training again. And every time you train one in a new thing, it
forgets all about the old thing. They got intelligence alright, but it&#x27;s the
dumbest kind of intelligence possible, mechanical, unaware of itself and devoid
of all purpose other than what we give it.<p>And what about ourselves? Building AlphaGo is a feat of human intelligence, but
how does it improve that human intelligence itself? How do we become smarter? We
can build machines to solve problems that we don&#x27;t understand, but they solve
them in ways that we still don&#x27;t understand. Except- we&#x27;re not even trying
anymore. We&#x27;ve given up. Knowledge is hard. Logic is hard. Just throw a bunch of
GPUs at the problem and make it go away.<p>Far from this being a promising time for artificial intelligence, I fear we&#x27;re
about to see a great dumbing down as funding is cut to everything but neural
networks research. A kind of AI summer, as it were.