The glass clinked against the table.  Perfect oval stones, black and white, filled the smooth wooden bowls.  The neat lines on the rosewood board were drawn cleanly.  Sweat rained down the back of his shirt.  He adjusted his glasses and looked again.  No, this couldn’t be right, he thought.  But it was crystal clear in front of him.  The black pieces seemed to be swallowing his white pieces like an expanding shadow.  The Go champion looked up at the people standing around him.  They were computer geeks, the ones that had come to watch how their program was doing.  They looked a little uneasy, not knowing whether to root for their AlphaGo or the poor human getting pummeled by a robot.  The man looked back at the board in front of him.  He would not be able to get out of this mess.

Published and reported by Nature news on January 27th, 2016, European defending champion, Fan Hui, lost a round of Go 0-5 to Al, not a person, but AlphaGo, the new computer Go-playing program. 

Since 1997, computer programs have been able to defeat reigning champions….at chess.  But one more challenge stands in front of scientists.  Go, a 2,500 year old game, has more legal moves than atoms in the universe.  Its simple board and rules have made it an interest for mathematicians around the world.
A nineteen by nineteen board, its expanse is already much greater than the standard eight by eight chess board.  Without difference between pieces except for color, the number of ways to be played or almost as close to infinite as possible.  Many humans have made it their life mission to master the game of Go, and it takes years, even decades, to learn everything.  Even then, the simple yet ever so complicated concept of this game is hard to grasp, let alone master.

Although programs like DeepBlue have conquered the best grandmasters in the world, go programs have to be written differently.  AlphaGo, made by Google’s DeepMind, has the ability to teach itself.  As soon as the computer learned the rules, it was given games played by all human Go championship games to observe.  With each game, the program inputs information into itself on game-winning strategies.  It can learn.
Bottom line, AlphaGo is just like another human.  But at the same time, it’s not.  Computer don’t have needs that humans do.  Robots don’t need food, sleep, love, rest, or even bathroom time.  Therefore, programs can learn all day and night, easily catching up to humans.

But while we may be constantly cheering for the next milestone in technology, an inner fear takes over everyone.  What we have created may destroy us too.  It may be a simple game at the moment, but with programs like AlphaGo that have the ability to learn faster and better than the erroneous specimen of creatures we are, robots could soon take over our world. 

Already, machines have replaced the jobs of many.  In meat packaging factories, machines don’t have to be paid, only cared for.  They can work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They will not ask for a vacation or quit their jobs.  In hospitals, some surgeries are conducted by robots. Without malfunctions, the calculations of the machine and the preciseness of the titanium claw moving the scalpel would be much more accurate.  These robots can be trained to go faster, jump higher, be stronger.

With this, thousands could lose their jobs.  Humans would become the ultimate consumer, buying groceries from robot cashiers, paying self-driven taxi cabs, depositing money into self-controlled banks.  After so long, with Homo sapiens considering themselves at the very top of the food chain, we can now find someone who is more athletic and more intelligent. With this, what we create could possibly destroy us as well.

However, with these new machines, we can do things that never seemed possible before.  Sending rovers to Jupiter and drilling into the Earth’s core are all at the top of this world’s to-do list, that wouldn’t happen unless we had top notch technology. 

Humans will still be able to hold on to the things that machines might never be able to do.  Emotions are one of the only things we have that a machine cannot be taught.  A program cannot input data on how to love, how to feel sorrow, how to be angry.  People may always have the upper hand at creativity while robots may have a hard time brainstorming ideas for the next Shakespeare.

This world needs technology.  But many people are afraid that it could ruin us as well.  From an ancient Chinese game, programs could be developed to do more and more abilities originally done by humans.  And with this comes many consequences.  But with it also comes with the rewards that people have worked for since the beginning of time.  From Mesopotamia’s invention of the wheel, humans have been inventing for the use of efficiency and “betterness”.  A hundred years ago, when the plane was still new, people clapped their hands and stomped their feet at the sight of a flying machine.  Most of them probably didn’t think that this would harm the railroad, automobile, and boat transportation business.  Now, the time has come for another great movement to take place.  Some people may learn to embrace this and others will fear it.  But whether we like it or not, it is coming.

Fan Hui let out an exasperated sigh.  Four games had been taken from him, but now the black pieces spread over his, infecting the board like a disease.  With one silent nod of his head, the man finally wiped the sweat off his palms, and bowed his head deeply, showing superiority to the newest winner.  This March, fourteen-time world Go champion, Lee Sedol, considered number one on the planet, will be playing against AlphaGo.  If this person falls to the computer, Go will then have probably also fallen from the hands of mankind into the hands of technology.

What will happen to us in the future?  In months or years, not even generations, artificial intelligence might probably be better than us in almost all skills, not just Go.  Will we, the proudest kings on the planet, also bow our heads to the newly glorified masters of our universe, the masters that we have created ourselves?