Intel's Bob Rogers explains the possibilities that emerge as AI progresses beyond standard machine learning. DeepMind's self-taught Go champion is just the beginning. DeepMind, the division of the Alphabet conglomerate that is devoted to artificial intelligence, recently announced that its Go-playing AI, called Alpha Go, had evolved into a new iteration it calls AlphaGo Zero. The reason for the zero is that the new version is capable of teaching itself how to win the game from scratch. "Zero is even more powerful and is arguably the strongest Go player in history," according to the DeepMind announcement.

Amid surging investment in artificial intelligence over the past few years and continuing concern about the implications of the technology, the White House announced on Tuesday that it intends to hold a series of workshops and form an inter-agency working group to examine the benefits and risks of AI. In a blog post, Ed Felten, Deputy US Chief Technology Officer, framed the issue in a way that excludes speculative scenarios presenting AI as a threat to humanity, a concern raised by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. While worries about runaway malevolent AI are often raised in public discussions of the technology, real AI research is more mundane, as in Google's effort to improve the conversational capabilities of its software by feeding it romance novels. "Today's AI is confined to narrow, specific tasks, and isn't anything like the general, adaptable intelligence that humans exhibit," said Felten. "Despite this, AI's influence on the world is growing. The rate of progress we have seen will have broad implications for fields ranging from healthcare to image- and voice-recognition."