A Predator of Information

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

Eliza was a program! John Henry had a soul!

29 March 2016 9:39 PM (musing)

As the champion of Humanity fell beneath the might of AlphaGo, I heard somewhere that Mr. Sedol was only the fourth best go player in the world. (By current rankings I think he is actually the second.) This made me imagine that the three best are kept in reserve to save their species from the Machines.

Number Three spent the match deep beneath the pentagon watching every move of the game, assisted by teams of mathematicians and machine learning specialists who deconstruct each of AlphaGo's plays. Now, he studies, analyzes, watching and learning every strategy that the Machine can bring to bear and how counter them.

Number Two is in a secret research station in Siberia. There, with the aid of powerful drugs, virtual reality, meditation, training in other modes of thought and speech (perhaps he spends an entire month living under water with a breathing mask while speaking Fith), his mind is being broken down and remade so that he is, in a real sense, no longer human. Thus, they hope, AlphaGo will be helpless against an opponent whose mode of thought is completely outside of its corpus.

Finally, Number One, the greatest master of go, lies frozen in liquid helium in a casket of gold that floats atop a seemingly endless sea of quicksilver that lies hidden beneath the Forbidden City, waiting since the sixteenth century where he was placed by an ancient sage against the day when all humanity would need him to arise and be their champion.

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