When IBM's Deep Blue first defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, the world chess champion accused the company of cheating. There was no way, he thought, that the computer could have beaten him without direct assistance from a skilled human player. But now the situation has flipped entirely. When grandmasters find themselves at the receiving end of a few mind-blowingly brilliant moves today, they accuse their opponent of using a computer. The only worthwhile competition for top chess engines is one another. The programs have become too powerful; humankind has lost.

When I first became focused on the military and existential concerns of AI in 2012, there was only a small handful of publications and organizations focused on the ethical concerns of AI. MIRI, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and the personal blogs of Ben Goertzel and Nick Bostrom was most of my reading at the time. These limited sources focused mostly on the consequences of artificial general intelligence (i.e. By 2014, artificial intelligence made its way firmly onto the radar of almost everyone in the tech world. New startups began (by 2015) ubiquitously including "machine learning" in their pitch decks, and 3-4-year-old startups were re-branding themselves around the value proposition of "AI."

The use of machine learning (ML) assisted annotation has accelerated within every vertical that uses artificial intelligence (AI). From the virtual fittings rooms that brands provide when you're shopping online to self-driving cars that will soon be on every highway, these technologies are only possible through ambitious AI. I've spent most of my career building ML models and driving algorithms to innovate AI on a global scale. Throughout that time, I've learned that there's a core element to ensuring proper ML algorithms: high-quality training data. Without it, no matter how ambitious your vision is, it simply won't work.

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series developed by GSC Game World is somewhat of an underrated gem with a global cult following. They are a trilogy of games that take on the role of depicting an alternate history. Within this world, the Chernobyl Incident occurs twice, rather than once. The second time Chernobyl is hit with a blast of radiation, it changes the landscape around it, causing all sorts of issues. There is no clear cause within the game lore but the area is contaminated beyond any repair, leaving it extremely hostile and teeming with unknown creatures born from mutation and other elements.