CapitalistImperialistPig

Science fiction was a big part of my youth, from age ten until at least the end of my teens. Much of what I loved was already classical, from Jules Verne to Edgar Rice Burroughs to the golden age of SF in the 1930s-1950s. Lately, I've turned back to SF in a small way, but mostly been disappointed. Currently I'm reading New York 2140 , a fairly highly praised book by Kim Stanley Robinson. The hard SF of my youth was filled with astonishing predictions: nuclear power, space travel, robots, communication satellites, smartphones. There were some others that didn't work out: time travel, psychokinesis, and that staple of Popular Science, flying cars, but overall, guys like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were amazingly prescient as well as entertaining. The central conceit of New York, 2140 is that sea levels have risen 50 feet due to global warming, but that Manhattan underwater is still thriving, and many major buildings of today, suitably reinforced ...

It's over. Humans had a good run on this planet, but our time is nearly up. Google DeepMind's AlphaGo has just clocked a strong professional Go player 5-0 in a five game match. It will take on Lee Sedol, the World's best human month after next, but even if the human ekes out a win, the handwriting is already on the wall, or maybe I should say, the pixels are already in memory. It has been about twenty years since computers cracked chess, but the ancient game of Go had been stubbornly resistant. Probably even more interesting than the fact of the accomplishment is the way it was done, not by brute computer power or clever algorithms, but with deep neural networks. Such networks are electronic emulations of the way brains work, and the networked learned, in effect, by distilling a kind of essence of millions of games it studied. Such networks, powered by enormous computing power, are now demolishing artificial intelligence problems that had defied researchers for a co...