This is Technology Ethics

6RESPONSIBILITY AND TECHNOLOGY: MIND THE GAP(S)?

6.1 Two Events

6.1 In March 2016, an artificially intelligent computer program—“AlphaGo”—faced off against the world champion of the ancient game of Go. In preparation, the engineers behind the computer program had trained AlphaGo in two ways: on a huge data set of existing Go games and by letting AlphaGo play millions of games against itself. This way, the computer program was able to develop strategies for how to play Go well and thereby get ready for the challenge. The world champion of Go—or, perhaps one should say, the human world champion of Go—was a Korean man named Lee Sedol. Sedol and AlphaGo played a total of five games. Sedol won one of those games. But the other four games were won by AlphaGo. So, just like the computer program Deep Blue had beaten the human world champion of chess—Garry Kasparov—in 1996, now the world champion of Go had also been beaten by an artificially intelligent computer program.¹

6.2 One interesting thing was that this was a computer program and not a robot. And so a human being had to perform the part of moving the stones around on the Go playing board. That human being—one of the DeepMind employees working on the project—did not understand the strategies of the AlphaGo program. Instead, he simply followed the instructions about what to do that the program gave to him. He himself could never have won a single game of Go against Lee Sedol. His only contribution was to move the pieces around ...