'MOVE 37' - Intelligence goes Artificial

In 2016, Lee Sedol, the world champion of the Asian board game ‘Go’, took on ‘AlphaGo’ - the machine program that mimicked the neural networks of the human brain. ‘Go’ is believed to be invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is one of the oldest board games continuously played till date and with over 46 million worldwide players in the present day. ‘AlphaGo’ was designed as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program to showcase to the world what is called ‘Deep Learning’. AlphaGo was fed with instructions of the game and also with an abundance of data on all kind of moves made by players in the game. The machine studies these moves and then comes up with its own creative moves. So, the program is not really following the instructions or code that you gave it, but is creating its own new codes based on what it keeps learning. What happened next is something that made the world stand up and take notice. In Game 2 - Move 37, the machine came up with a very surprising move. A move that after thousands of years of playing, no human had ever thought of making! AlphaGo went to take 4 games while Lee Sedol took 1! Could this just be the beginning of one kind of intelligence taking over another – the ones that had ruled the world for centuries? Well, I don’t have an answer to that but all I can tell you is that in November 2019, Lee announced his retirement from professional play, arguing that he could never be the top player of ‘Go’ due to the increasing dominance of AI! 

In 1998, when Google opened up to the world, we all thought that we had found a new way to ‘search’ the internet. 8 years down the line, in 2006, when Facebook opened up to anyone over the age of 13, we all thought we had found a new way to search for friends and stay connected with them and know what they like and do. 8 year later, in 2014, amazon released Alexa and we probably thought that it would make our life easier through voice interactive home automation. Till date, I'm not sure how many of us realize the fact that we are not the ones searching google. It’s actually Google that is searching us! Facebook is not there to give us information of our friends or the things they like. It is actually there to take information from us on what we like, whom we like, what we think and more importantly how we behave. And for that matter the likes of Alexa are not really out there just to automate our world and make our lives easier, they are out there to drill out the new oil of the digital age - ‘Data’. They are all out there to drill, refine and sell that oil packed into these new ‘Digital Barrels’. We are the ones being sold. And Move 37 just doubled the game! 

A year after Move 37 happened, China declared it will aim at being the world leader in AI by the year 2030. Currently the United States have established a strong lead in AI discovery but the fact that China has far more of the digital oil reserves is a great opportunity just waiting to disrupt things. The fuel of AI is data. And the more data you can feed these machines, the better they will become at what they do. And obviously China has far more data in the form of its population and a far better socio-political environment that can help them emerge as a better and bigger Saudi Arabia when it comes to drilling out and packing the new digital oil barrels. 

The way AI will disrupt industries across the world is unimaginable. Processing 5000 personal features from all the data available about you on the internet in just under 8 seconds, from when you click a button to apply for a loan and the machine either denying your application or crediting the amount to your account is something that will happen in the very near future. Google’s FaceNet already has a 99.63% accuracy in recognizing you from the widely used Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset. Megvii can recognize your face in less than a 100 millisecond. Combine these powers of data mining and AI with what made Edward Snowden seek asylum in Russia and you will realize how the word ‘liberty' might just disappear from the dictionary over the next few decades. 

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon musk has been vocal with “Mark my Words. AI is far more dangerous than nukes”. The late physicist Stephen Hawking similarly told that “AI’s impact could be cataclysmic unless its rapid development is strictly and ethically controlled”. The challenge here would probably be that the vast majority of those working on the AI technology come from a very different generation of people with very different ethical and social outlooks developed from experiences built around the new era of instant gratification and the fake news revolution. 

The jobs that will be automated in the very near future or the way IBM Watson will disrupt the way the legal and many other industries work or how AI could make accountants an extinct species in the future is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how AI will disrupt the way of life as we see it today and how it could eventually widen the borders of inequality in the new world of Data Capitalism.  

If you look at the Facebook – Cambridge Analytica Scandal, you will realize how AI could eventually start nudging human behavior in favor of the power centers in the new world of Data Capitalism. The very fact that China and the United States are now racing for a bigger share in the AI Story means that eventually humanity could be the biggest losers as the Game Theory comes into play here.  

The fact that ‘The Big Five’ companies combined, hold a net worth equaling to Japan, the third largest economy in the world, only points towards how inequalities would increase when China gets its own ‘Big Five’ in the AI race. And all we are talking about till now is AI working outside our bodies in digging the digital oil. The tipping point lies in the very near future when AI will get entangled with biotech and extend the oil drilling part into our bodies! The second cataclysmic event, would be when deep learning techniques get integrated in edtech. And as a person working in the education domain, this is what worries me the most. Because I believe this will be the point from where machines would start taking human intelligence into the artificial domain. The ‘real’ Move37! The point from where machines would take over what our future generation learn, know and think, in order to nudge reactions and behaviors that seem right to them, not from the instructions or codes that you once gave them, but from the ones they wrote themselves!  

As late Stephen Hawking says, unless we join together and find a way to strictly and ethically control this right now, and before AI gets entangled in so many domains, we are just at the verge of another ‘Move 37’ that would exterminate the very gift of human life – Choice!