AI has reached a tipping point in our collective awareness as a species. It's all I seem to be reading and talking about. A study fielded by Ipsos in the halcyon days of Jan. 2022 showed that 60% of consumers expect that AI will “profoundly change their daily life” in the next 3-5 years. With the launch of ChatGPT in Nov. 2022, it seems things will never be the same.

Of course, AI has been around a long time, and is already revolutionizing areas as diverse as medical imaging analysis, meteorology, and data analysis. Most of this progress is invisible to most people. What captures our imaginations is when AI is able to supersede humans in more mundane activities formerly thought unassailable. Milestones include:

·      1997 – IBM’s Deep Blue beats world champion Gary Kasparov in Chess.
·      2011 – IBM’s Watson beats Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy.
·      2016 – Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo beats world #1 Ke Jie in Go.

Now it seems humans have struck back at our computer overlords, at least in the game of Go. Recently, a human comprehensively defeated a top AI system. How did Kellin Pelrine do it? By executing tactics suggested beforehand by… a computer program, one that had probed the AI for weaknesses.

It’s likely that its programmers fix this tactical weakness and the AI goes on dominating as before. What’s notable about this, though, is that this kind of collaboration between human and machine anticipates how we will interact with and utilize AI moving forward.

Humans may set the goal and strategy for a given task, and machines may create the tactics to get there. Humans and machines may collaborate in an iterative process to create copy, write a song, or design a building. AI will still need guidance and supervision.

Indeed, we’re already using computers as tools to enhance our intellect and expand our scope of knowledge. (I executed numerous Google searches to research the facts I needed to write this post.) We use telescopes to peer into the cosmos and microscopes to examine the atomic world, tools we invented to enhance our limited senses.

From this broader perspective, AI is just another tool created by humans to augment our human abilities. It will allow us to think faster, see further, and expand the breadth and depth of our intellect as never before, revolutionizing how we work, play, and interact.

Or it could crush us all. It could really go either way at this point.

Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI – Ars Technica