Upon reflection, there are several things that lead me to think that the producers are tossing in a gratuitous go game just to advance public knowledge of go.

Connerty claims that he doesn't have room in his apartment. But his office is crowded also. He is the #2 attorney in the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, which suggests a low 6-figure salary. He can afford an apartment with some room - even at New York prices.

( a thoroughly twisted character brilliantly played by Paul Giamatti )

The YouTube channel Second Thought released a video today about AI [..]

I just wish people would also provide transcripts to such videos …

I am 1) hard of hearing, 2) can read much faster than people can talk, and 3) English is not my native language … this way I alway get the impression that for it is more important for some people to hear themselves blabbering than to convey their assumedly important message

..Then there are groups like DeepMind, now owned by Google, who developed AlphaGo, the AI that defeated Lee Sedol, the best Go player in the world. The revolutionary thing about this particular AI is that the ancient Chinese game we call Go is much, much more complicated than something like chess. Deep Blue, the IBM computer that defeated chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997, was groundbreaking at the time because until that point, no computer had ever bested a human at chess.

However, Deep Blue isn't really all that impressive. Due to the limited number of possible moves in chess, it was able to brute force its way through the calculations to pick the best moves. Go, on the other hand, has a staggering number of possible moves, as many as there are atoms in the entire universe. Because of this huge number of possibilities, AlphaGo had to take a different approach. In contrast to Deep Blue or Watson, AlphaGo is classified as a general artificial intelligence, meaning it's not restricted to performing a specific set of tasks.

Simply put, if you provide a general purpose AI with a task its never encountered before and allow it to run overnight for example, when you check on it the next morning it will have mastered the task. Of course, the time requirement varies with the complexity of the task, but in the case of AlphaGo, DeepMind did exactly that with the game Space Invaders. No experience with the game, then the best in the world the following morning. These general purpose AI learn from their mistakes in successes and build new and improved versions of themselves.

Self-improving AI like AlphaGo are the harbingers of stronger AI to come. And with the rate at which they've improved even in the last few years, many industry leaders expect to see exponential growth within the next decade. The potential next step for AI is what many people are afraid of, including high-profile scientists and innovators like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. The looming possibility that holds such appeal in science fiction is the potential development of what's called Advanced General Intelligence, or AGI. The distinguishing factor with AGI is that it's not only able to perform routine calculations and learn by trial-and-error, but also exhibit the use of biological cognitive functions such as planning, using common sense, and making complicated decisions under uncertainty.

Like any other artificial intelligence, an AGI would begin as software on a computer. As robotic technology improved, we would begin to see tests like the ones in the 2014 film Ex-Machina. This is where the all-too-common fear of a robot uprising comes from. In fact, Elon Musk is an investor in Google DeepMind, just to keep an eye on things. While there are a few high-profile people advocating caution, others such as Kurzweil maintain that there's really nothing to fear. He predicts that while yes, we will reach a point at which machines will outpace humans in intelligence, what we should expect to see first is a sort of synthesis of man and machine.

He is not necessarily talking about cyborgs, but rather advancements in medicine and nanotechnology that will dramatically extend and improve human life. Kurzweil isn't alone in thinking this way. Elon Musk is currently working closely with a non-profit called OpenAI, which has the goal of merging humanity with machines. Musk suspects that such measures will protect humanity from becoming irrelevant in the face of super-intelligent computers. It sounds like science fiction, but we've already made great strides in using technology to augment people suffering from Parkinson's disease.

The next step according to Kurzweil is to connect the human brain directly to the cloud, removing the smart device as a middle man to the aggregate of human knowledge. Such a plan may seem far-fetched, but Kurzweil is quick to point out that predictions thirty years ago were thought to be ridiculous. But now that they've happened, it seems unthinkable that there was ever a time without cell phones, search engines, and the World Wide Web, all of which he predicted.

The current goal is to create AI-driven nano-bots that could be implanted in the human brain and would function just like a wireless car for your neocortex, the region of the brain associated with intelligence, the higher motions, and creativity. In Ray Kurzweil's words, "We are going to add additional layers of abstraction and create more profound means of expression, so we are going to be more musical, we are going to be funnier, we are going to be sexier, and be better at expressing more loving sentiments."

So, before we can expect a robot uprising, we can hopefully look forward to disease-fighting nano-bots and a direct link to all human knowledge right from our own brains. Not exactly cyborgs, more like Humanity 2.0. While there will no doubt be strong opposition to putting any kind of technology in our heads, many people eagerly await the day they can upgrade and be on the cutting edge of this unparalleled new era of technology. Once we've reached THAT point, then we can start worrying about the potential legal, ethical, and societal ramifications of humanoid robots.

But that's a topic for another video.

Isn't that a 5 in a row game?

The Cyberlaw Podcast: Did AlphaGo Launch an Arms Race With China?