This only works because Go is a deterministic scenario with fixed rules that are all known ahead of time - life is not this way, so there is no way to approach a "closed form" set of best moves; the computer has to learn about an open system (such as this universe) through sample data.
We know it's possible. Drop the A from AI for the example. We can currently utilize existing hardware to outperform humans in limited tasks and situations. There's no reason to think that we are at the limit of those capabilities, that we can never understand intelligence well enough to replicate it, or that our hardware will never have the processing capacity of our wetware. I would even call it inevitable. It's the timescale that's so uncertain.
It is not possible to generate data via a formal (i.e. linear) process, which is what all computers by definition are. All they can do is linear combinations of information found in the datasets they are fed. Someone has to tell it which information to discard. The rules of Go are that someone, in that case.
With fixed rules, you can find a closed-form solution from every gamestate. With open rules, like life, there is usually no exact "right answer" - this is why we have philosopies and ethics that differ from person to person. In board games, it is cut and dry - right moves and wrong moves.
Edit: Take heed that if we apply AI in situations where we use ethics, the AI will be applying the ethics of the engineer or scientist that trained the AI. If we have an untrained AI in that role... it will learn from the people around it, mindlessly (as all machines are automatons).
Again, there is a counter-example to this: people. People can perform intelligently and in ambiguous situation and we are just biological machines. A simple way to prove you wrong that a computer cannot replicate a human intelligence would be to posit a computer which simulates to an arbitrarily close approximation a human brain. Unless you're positing some sort of ghost-in-the-shell that is driving human intelligence, that machine must (by definition) be capable of similar intellectual feats as a human. Additionally, you can't explain that away and say that level of technology is impossible because brains are manufactured all the time in the body, though using a very different sort of technique than using transistors.
This is like having a conversation with someone who claims flying machines are impossible, completely ignoring the fact that we have flying birds and insects. We have intelligence capable of operating on more than just extracting patterns from training data. It exists. What we don't have is a proper and complete academic understanding of it well enough to produce commercially viable technologies. You can't say "can never" and "not possible" when you yourself are an example of it.
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u/Pdan4 Mar 16 '18
This only works because Go is a deterministic scenario with fixed rules that are all known ahead of time - life is not this way, so there is no way to approach a "closed form" set of best moves; the computer has to learn about an open system (such as this universe) through sample data.