Planes fly differently from birds. Cars move differently from horses. And computers think differently from humans. That had always been my assumption but if you needed more proof, Google’s AlphaZero program, which had previously shown novel ways of playing Go, has just learned how to play chess incredibly well. It did so in 24 hours and without studying any prior games. Instead it just played games following the rules of the movement of pieces and learned from that.
I encourage everyone to check out the technical paper on Arxiv, as it contains many fascinating insights. But today I want to focus instead on a key high level implication: Computers are not constrained to learning and thinking like humans. And for many, many tasks that will give them at an extraordinary advantage over humans. Just like mechanized transport turned out to be superior to horses in almost all circumstances.
Our big brain that was shaped by the forces of evolution is a marvel in its complexity. But it has evolved to let us deal with a great many different scenarios and try as we might, we cannot apply more than a small fraction of our brain to a specific problem (such as playing chess). And even then our speed of learning is constrained by extremely slow clock cycles (see my previous post about AlphaGo).
AlphaZero’s success should be a startling wake up call. When we developed motorized transport, we went from 25 million employed horses in the US in 1915 to 3 million by 1960 and then we stopped tracking as the number fell further. We now have the technology to free ourselves from the ridiculous demands on humans to spend their lives as machines. We can have computers and robots carry out many of those tasks. We can be free to excel at those things that make us distinctly human, such as caring for each other.
But for that to happen, we must leave the Industrial Age behind and embrace what I call the Knowledge Age. AlphaZero can be the beginning of a great era for humanity, if we stop clinging to outdated ideas such as confusing human purpose with work or thinking every allocation problem can be solved by a market. These are the topics of my book “World After Capital,” which continues to become more relevant with breakthroughs such as AlphaZero.
