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're
the epitome of artificial stupidity: they learn, but they don't understand
anything that they learn. They can'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'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't understand, but they solve
them in ways that we still don't understand. Except- we're not even trying
anymore. We'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'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.