Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.

Description

This week we're watching AlphaGo - The Movie (2017), which is about AlphaGo's match against Lee Sedol in March 2016. This was the AI event of the year - a clear, legible demonstration that AI had crossed a threshold many thought was still a decade away.

Nearly a decade later, with (weakly) activated RSL-3 protections, Grok waifus, and discussions of AGI timelines measured in years rather than decades, it's worth revisiting this moment. What did we think we were seeing then? What were we actually seeing? Can this cultural artifact tell us anything about how we process AI capability jumps?

Apparently it's a pretty compelling watch too. At 90 minutes, we'll watch it together and then discuss.

Supplementary Readings

• Impact of Go AI on the professional Go world - Hajin Lee (2020)
• AI’s Victories in Go Inspire Better Human Game Playing - Emily Willingham for Scientific American (2023)
• [Gift Article] NYT 2024 Lee Sedol Profile - Daisuke Wakabayashi and Jin Yu Young (2024)

Possible Discussion Questions

• How has the vibe around AI achievements shifted from 2016 to today, both in the community and in the wider world?
• After AlphaGo, the Go world pivoted and started using AI heavily for practice and novel move exploration. Outside of rationality, are you in any communities with certain norms around AI use - whether embracing it fully, cautiously using it, or banning it outright (e.g. chess, digital art, vibe coding enthusiasts, various professions)? Do you know how those communities settled on the conventions that they do?
• Watching in 2024/2025, what aspects of the 2016 discourse around AlphaGo seem quaint or misguided? Which still feel important and prescient or like a portent of things to come?
• Lee Sedol retired from professional Go in 2019 due to the increasing dominance of AI, which he called "an entity that cannot be defeated". From the NYT piece: "what he regarded as an art form, an extension of a player’s own personality and style, was now cast aside for an algorithm’s ruthless efficiency." But he's still kinda just one guy, and go's still around, and chess is doing better than ever even though Deep Blue is older than I am. Are there specific people or industries that you think might be unusually vulnerable or resistant to "why bother anymore" collapse? How might the mathematicians fare when AI proofs become incomprehensible? Hollywood in a world of superior AI movies?