When AIs and humans work together they discover superior solutions to the world’s problems that would elude either working alone. Together, they will change the very process of thinking

Michal Bednarski

LIKE other human champions facing a machine opponent, Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz rated his chances. “A realistic goal would be 4-1 in my favour,” he told an interviewer before the match.

One of the world’s best players of video game StarCraft II, Komincz was at the height of a successful esports career. Artificial intelligence company DeepMind invited him to face its latest AI, a StarCraft II-playing bot called AlphaStar, on 19 December 2018.

Komincz was expected to be a tough opponent. He wasn’t. After being thrashed 5-0, he was less cocky. “I wasn’t expecting the AI to be that good,” he said. “I felt like I was learning something.”

It was just the latest in a series of unexpected victories for machines that stretch back to chess champion Garry Kasparov’s 1997 defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue. In 2017, another of DeepMind’s AIs, AlphaGo Master, beat the world number one Go player a decade before most researchers predicted it would be possible. The company’s AIs then mastered chess and StarCraft – a game played with dozens of different pieces with hundreds of moves a minute.

But this isn’t just a case of humans being humbled by superhuman AI. The real story is that each win gives us a glimpse of how AIs will make us superhuman too. That’s because thinking is set to become a double act. Working together, humans and AIs will bounce ideas back and forth, each guiding the other to better solutions than would be possible alone.

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The potential goes far …