In March 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the reigning Korean Go world champion, 4-1.
A small but important detail: AlphaGo is not a human being, but an artificial intelligence programme developed by Google DeepMind.
This domination of the machine over man is reminiscent of Deep Blue's victory over Garry Kasparov, the chess supercomputer developed by IBM in the early 1990s - but with one major difference: Deep Blue, with its prodigious computing power, could envisage every possible combination for each move (up to 300 million positions per second). However, if the number of different possible games in chess is estimated at 10120, this rises to ... 10600 for the game of Go: the 'brute force' of Deep Blue would prove powerless on a Go board!
AlphaGo has made its mark through expertise: it has been trained to imitate human players, by learning from tens of thousands of games played by very high-level masters: the brutality of Deep Blue has now been replaced by the artificial intelligence of AlphaGo.
For IBM, it was a showcase for the power of its supercomputer... assisted by around twenty technicians to ensure that it worked properly; for Google, it was more a point of departure towards a new world, or a new planetary domination.
Those who imagine Google as a simple search engine, efficient enough to generate billions of dollars in advertising revenue, have only a very fragmented vision of the Californian giant; those who add Android, YouTube, Google cars and Google maps, barely less: this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Simply because Google no longer exists, having been renamed Alphabet last year. It includes a home automation division, Nest Labs, which is positioning itself in the highly competitive, albeit still incipient, market for connected objects; Calico, a biotechnology company; and Google DeepMind, which specialises in artificial intelligence. And the same Alphabet has developed Singularity University with NASA, presented as a university, think-tank and incubator all rolled into one: the Singularity is the point of no return where machines will surpass human beings, where artificial intelligence will surpass our own: we haven't reached that point yet, but a new stage has just been reached.
Utopianism on the part of the ultra-wealthy founders of an ultra-powerful group? Yet they are not the only ones thinking along these lines: Facebook, which left later because it was younger, has decided to open its European artificial intelligence laboratory in Paris.
At a time when the GAFAs (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) are being overtaken by the TUNAs (Tesla, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb), the battle for global domination is underway, with colossal investments being made. But make no mistake, the roadmap for a Google, a Facebook or an IBM has already been written.
Some go from strength to strength, like Google with AlphaGo, while others go from strength to strength, like Microsoft, whose artificial intelligence Tay suddenly became racist when it came into contact with Twitter users!
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is well and truly underway... but we're not sure it's really the best.
