Continuations

For a long time there was a narrative that computers would only be good at automating routine tasks, leaving creativity to us humans. I never believed this because creativity isn’t some kind of magic but rather much of it is based on exploring variations either based on known rules or based on precedents. For example, I titled a post in 2016 “Machine Creativity: Possibly Sooner than Anticipated.” Also in my book The World After Capital, I have a section on the universality of computation that...

AlphaGo has won its series in the game Go against grandmaster Lee Sedol 4-1. I wrote an initial post about AlphaGo after its first victory against a lesser ranked player. Humans have very big brains compared to the neural networks used by the program which shows that humans are unlikely to be able to use much of their brain for any one specific task. This, combined with the ability to run machine networks fast and against a lot of training data will make this technology formidable for many ta...