What the AI Behind AlphaGo Teaches Us About Humanity

[Narrator] Game one surprised Go Master Lee Sedol.

Game two left him speechless,

and in game three he felt powerless.

Sedol came back to win in game four

but the final game ended

with Google's AlphaGo defeating the Go master again.

A computer had beaten the best Go player

in the world, four to one.

The weight of this defeat stirred a certain sadness

in many people around the world

because unlike chess, Go is a complex game

that requires human intuition and creativity

or so it was thought.

AlphaGo's system uses deep neuro-networks

which approximate the web of neurons

in the human brain.

These networks learn to perform tasks

by analyzing large amounts of digital data.

The AlphaGo team took it a step farther.

Using reinforcement learning,

they set up countless matches

in which different versions of AlphaGo

played each other.

So AlphaGo learns from human moves,

and then it develops its own strategy.

It understands how humans play,

but it can also look beyond that

to play an entirely different level of the game.

This may seem frightening,

but the reality is that the technologies

at the heart of AlphaGo are the future.

They're poised to reinvent everything

from robotics to scientific research.

In the years to come

as we humans work with these machines

our genius will only grow in tandem with our creations.

Well, hopefully.

So don't view it as human versus machine,

but rather human and machine.