Controlling AI is the great challenge of our age
From our UK edition
In 1997 the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by an IBM computer system called Deep Blue. It had defied all expectations, exploring some 300 million possible moves in one second. The most that skilled chess players can contemplate is about 110 moves at any given time. It was a seminal moment in the advance of artificial intelligence – even if not fully understood, writes Richard Susskind in How to Think About AI. People did not wholly grasp the impact of the exponential power of computers, nor that new ways would be found to develop systems that could achieve human expert-level performance. Fast forward to 2016 and to AlphaGo, a machine designed to play the complex game Go, which has more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe.
