The technological singularity and the transhumanist dream – Idees

In 1997, an AI beat a human world chess champion for the first time in history (it was IBM's Deep Blue playing Garry Kasparov). Fourteen years later, in 2011, IBM's Watson beat two winners of Jeopardy! In late 2017, DeepMind's AlphaZero reached superhuman levels of play in three board games (chess, go and shogi) in just 24 hours of self-learning without any human intervention, i.e. it just played itself. Some of the people who have played against it say that the creativity of its moves make it seem more like an alien that a computer program. But despite all that, in 2019 nobody has yet designed anything that can go into a strange kitchen and fry an egg. Are our machines truly intelligent? The fact is that today AI can solve ever more complex specific problems with a level of reliability and speed beyond our reach at an unbeatable cost, but it fails spectacularly in the face of any challenge for which it has not been programmed.