AlphaGo is a triumph for humanity
... and not something to be afraid of. As anyone who hasn't been hiding under a rock knows, Google Deepmind's AlphaGo program decisively won its third game in a row against grandmaster Lee Sedol. First of all, I argue that we shouldn't find this surprising : We're still riding the exponential wave of the growth of computing power in hardware, and when that's coupled in significant software advances such as deep neural networks, we get great things. Go, despite its massive positional complexity, is still the kind of thing that computers excel at: It has a precisely defined objective and rules, it admits a fairly compact representation, and exists entirely within the world of bits. Second, I argue that this is an excellent excuse for all of humanity to pat itself on the back. Consider what went in to the AlphaGo victory: The Nature paper version of AlphaGo is noted to have used 1206 CPUs and 176 GPUs . The details are vague, but for our purposes don'