Every time there&#x27;s a &quot;breakthrough&quot; in AI, this question crops up.   Consciousness is poorly understood and there&#x27;s no good reason to think it&#x27;s a product of intelligence.<p>In this case, all that&#x27;s happened is that a game played by people can now be played well by a computer program which is designed specifically to recognize patterns.   (A go position is just a 19x19 array of trits.)   Computer programs reached human-level performance decades ago at chequers&#x2F;draughts, and later at chess and backgammon.   Those programs did not lead to a general AI.