Lee Se-dol’s Defeat and Why We Must All Become Artists.
The ancient Chinese game of Go, significantly more complex than Chess and frequently cited as the most difficult of board games, has more possible combinations of positions than there are atoms in the universe. This alone is daunting enough to dissuade all but the most dedicated and gifted players to join in the competition. South Korea’s Lee Se-dol is one such player. At least, he used to be.
Announcing his retirement at the ripe old age of 36 from competitive play, the 18-time Go champion remarked, “There is an entity that cannot be defeated”.
In 2016 Se-dol lost a match, four to one, to a silicon-based entity, a computer, running software called AlphaGo. AlphaGo is an early generation artificial intelligence computer program developed by Deepmind a UK company acquired by Google. AlphaGo has since been bested by two newer iterations of Deepmind software, AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero. Using “reinforcement learning” strategies AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero developed their game-playing skills unaided by playing against themselves millions of times. What took months for AlphaGo to “learn” took its later incarnations just days to achieve much greater mastery.
The stealthy unrelenting improvements in technology and Artificial Intelligence is now much faster than the pace of human evolutionary advance. It’s likely that the tipping point where the general capability of machines outway that of humans will be reached way before we realise for most work. Perhaps we’ve already reached it and we just don't know it yet.
Go is a game. But artificial intelligence does not distinguish between games and work the way humans do. We think of games as a distraction or entertainment. Something to be done in “spare time”. Secondary, if you will, to more important things like earning a living. But what if you are a silicon-based entity that doesn’t distinguish between playing a game of Go or things like reading an MRI, finding the perpetrator of a murder, determining how best to win a political campaign, how to build housing at one-tenth current cost, etc. When AlphaZero or its descendants become marginally better at something people get paid more to do there will be little conventional need for humans to work.
Over the centuries, society has developed various signals to represent individual achievement and social worth. Grand castles, expensive cars, advanced degrees, opulent jewellery for example. But, in a world where more and more top-performing humans are rendered obsolete by hyper-performing artificial workers, we must rethink how to measure human contributions to society. One of the most common criticisms of Universal Basic Income is that decoupling work from earned income is a formula for growing social demise. Without a need to work, we will invariably descend into a depressed ennui leading to a hedonistic existence reminiscent of the opium dens in a Dicken’s novella.
However, there’s always been a segment of society that doesn’t conform very well to a capitalistic, income-driven socioeconomic model. One where climbing the ladder of success takes a back seat to a more nuanced path of expression, creativity and social contribution. Where things like an 86% unemployment rate are not an absolute deterrent to career choice for many. Names like Poe, Bach, Vermeer, Dickensen, Wilde, all cultural giants, left the world a much richer place while personally, dying in poverty. Artists of all stripes often suffer low income, no benefits and worse in an attempt to follow their creative urges. For many, it’s not about choosing the path of the artist it’s about the path having chosen them.
Not everyone is cut out to be a STEM high-flyer. The more technology eats into a broad array of occupations the harder the great American Dream will be to follow using conventional laws of the supply/demand for human labour. Increasingly, artists will have a great deal to teach the rest of society about how to contribute when the measure of success is less about the size of the paycheck you get at the end of the week and more about how you use your particular set of gifts to leave the world a better place.
One shouldn’t have to die before the true value of their work is recognized. Perhaps soon, we may not have to.