artificial intelligence – Cubilone's Dimension

REVIEW: PLUTO

PLUTO: Naoki Urasawa x Ozamu Tezuka, Band 001 by Naoki Urasawa
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a review for the whole series, not just Pluto #1.

I read it on my smartphone. What a time to be alive!

There’s this I’ve noticed with manga, anime and how I take them in: very often, such series as Pluto, or Neon Genesis Evangelion while we’re at it, they start off strong and interesting, they throw you in well-crafted worlds with characters I want to know more about. The art is captivating and undoubtedly masterful. By the end, however, the plot’s typically so messed up I find it difficult to keep caring. And that’s precisely what happened with me and Pluto. Should I give up on “serious” manga?

That said, I concede that Pluto portrays a society where artificial intelligence has penetrated human society quite convincingly. A killer robot that’s left its (his?) past life behind and just wants to play the piano? Now that’s something I want to read more about.

Also, what’s with Urasawa and Germany? Monster also took place there and it seemed kind of arbitrary that it had to.

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LINK: GOOGLE’S DEEPMIND DEFEATS LEGENDARY GO PLAYER IN HISTORIC VICTORY

LINK

Video is from another significant Google victory against a puro earlier this year. When AI can defeat the best humans at the game “given to us by the Gods”, there are only few more steps to be taken before the AI becomes God itself.

Hey, I made an allusion to The Last Question without intending to from the start. Yay for me!

Biased as I am from reading Conversations with God Book 3 and incapable to, or perhaps unwilling, to understand God in any other way apart from as it was described by the books’ author Neale Donald Walsh, I’ll go down saying that the introduction of a godlike AI doesn’t necessarily mean that said AI would be fearsome and/or awe-inspiring: a godlike AI could reflect God in the same way people are gods, that is by being creators, especially of their own life and experience. AI could “just” become another life form trying to figure itself out and its place and purpose in the universe. The world would move on.

Relevant reddit posts: /r/futurology and /r/worldnews (for comparison’s sake)

THE MYSTERY OF GO, THE ANCIENT GAME THAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN’T WIN

Go-01 — Remi Coulom (left) and his computer program, Crazy Stone, take on grandmaster Norimoto Yoda in the game of Go. Photo: Takashi Osato/WIRED

Wired article on the state of things in developing a Go-playing program that will beat the grandmasters, something that apparently might not only be farther off than we thought, but also more difficult.

I was surprised to hear from programmers that the eventual success of these programs will have little to do with increased processing power. It is still the case that a Go program’s performance depends almost entirely on the quality of its code. Processing power helps some, but it can only get you so far. Indeed, the UEC lets competitors use any kind of system, and although some opt for 2048-processor-core super-computers, Crazy Stone and Zen work their magic on commercially available 64-core hardware.

[…]

Many Go players see the game as the final bastion of human dominance over computers. This view, which tacitly accepts the existence of a battle of intellects between humans and machines, is deeply misguided. In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe.