Howard Yu is a professor of strategic management and innovation at IMD business school.

It’s impressive that computers can be programmed to conduct conversations that make them indistinguishable from a person. But Google’s AlphaGo is demonstrating for the first time that machines can truly learn and think in a human way.

In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue program overwhelmed the world’s greatest player, Garry Kasparov, with a brute force approach, in which the machine could account for all the possible outcomes.

AlphaGo’s approach, on the other hand, is, potentially, a game changer. It can master games by adjusting as it goes.

Unlike chess, where each move affords about 40 options, the ancient board game Go, has up to 200 choices. The permutation of outcomes quickly compounds to a bewildering range of choices — more than the total number of atoms in the entire observable universe.



Before AlphaGo played against a human, Google researchers had been developing it to play video games — Space Invaders, Breakout, Pong and others. Without the need of any specific programming, the general purpose algorithm was able to master each game by trial and error — pressing different buttons randomly at first, then adjusting to maximize rewards. Game after game, the software proved to be cunningly versatile in figuring out an appropriate strategy, and then applying it without making any mistakes.

Whether Lee Se-dol, South Korea's Go champion, will win the rest of the games or not is irrelevant. The mere fact that AlphaGo learns and strategizes is a testament to the future of artificial intelligence beyond the realm of a human mind. An AlphaGo win in Go is icing on a cake that has already been baked.



The real question, now that machines are capable of approximating human intuition in decision making, is: How should we cultivate human talents going forward? Because it's clear that the human advantage is eroding fast. Skills like art expertise needed to “sense” forgeries, or medical specialty required to diagnose with a single “clinical glance,” may one day be obsolete.

Given the pace of development, future generations will need to achieve even higher intellectual and social ground. The way we define an “expert” needs to encompass an even stronger emphasis of how humans interact. In an age where empathy matters more and raw knowledge no longer suffices, the education system should be the first to undergo an overhaul.



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