For The Better - Email 7/11

For the Better comes to you bi-weekly with ideas about how and why to build companies focused on human flourishing and stories of the people who are doing it. Other enthusiasms may occasionally appear.

AlphaGo and the Future of AII’m a long-time fan of the game Go, so I was super interested to discover this 2016 post about its intersection with AI. It details how AI-powered AlphaGo eventually beat Go world champion Lee Sodol. The story is fascinating in its own right, but it also touches on many other questions about how AI reached this achievement and where it was then headed in terms of how it learned: “AlphaGo got where it did because it stood on the shoulders of human giants. In other situations, it has learned from scratch and played other computers (as in DeepMind’s mastery of Space Invaders). Thus, at the moment, AI is not able to learn something like this independent of 2,500 years of knowledge accumulated by humans. It will be a different matter if an AI can learn independently and defeat humans without ever seeing a human play.” Eight years later, that possibility has become a reality. AlphaGo was replaced by AlphaZero, which taught itself how to play with no human input and was soon better at the game than not only every human player, but AlphaGo, too. Then it taught itself how to play other games as well. There are two essential points in this story: 

• The assumption was that people would eventually stop playing Go (and chess) when computers were better than they were. But that hasn’t happened – at least, not fully. Of course, some people resigned themselves to this fate and simply quit. But the new generation of players incorporated AI into their own training and are using it to enhance their enjoyment of human vs. human games. 

• The other important point is that once AlphaZero was up and running it kept learning and expanding on its own recognizance. This is the same kind of technique we’re currently using to build AI language models, where AI is itself being used to generate the data that new AI then trains on 

The story is about more than just playing games. It’s a useful model for thinking about how AI is going to affect a whole range of professions – and a far better one to turn to than looking back at something like the printing press as a comparison. If we want to know how what we do is going to be transformed, looking at other realms where it has already overtaken humans, makes the most sense. It’s not a perfect comparison, but it fits a pattern that’s now being repeated, giving us something to go on. It also offers a hopeful take on a technology so many people are wary of. For example, we’ve come to expect that at the end of playing a game online, we get an automatic AI review of how we did. It wasn’t too long ago that we just walked away without knowing our mistakes, which was a barrier to playing. Now, every player in the world has a "stronger" player who tells them which moves were good or bad to help them up their game. By showing that AI has been integrated into human play in positive ways no one imagined, rather than replacing it altogether, the story of Go and AI reminds us that the coming integration of AI into so many of our daily tasks and pleasures may well continue to bring us unexpected benefits. Worth Your TimeThe elemental foeThis piece by Noah Smith touches on some of my staunchest beliefs about the value and importance of sustainable growth and long-term vision. But it's not about how to build a company or a product. It's about how, and why, we have to work together (and that "together" is key) to pull as much of the world as we can out of poverty not just now, but permanently. As Smith writes, "If we burn the walls of our fortress to throw a party in the moment, there will be nothing left to protect our descendants, and the foe will devour them." He also reminds us that daunting as the task may seem, we already possess the power to do it  "Our true wealth is not gold and paintings lying in vaults in rich men’s mansions; it is the system of industrial production and logistics that is built and rebuilt and maintained every day by billions of human hands."The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in historyLooking at poverty from another angle, Casey Handmer notes that "the number of humans enduring extreme poverty has fallen in both absolute and relative terms, from nearly universal just 200 years ago to rapidly vanishing today." The problem is that this incredible achievement has been "underwritten by the consumption of copious quantities of cheap energy, almost all of it from fossil coal, oil, and gas." He believes we're in the midst of the sixth industrial revolution, to solar energy, then pulls together a list of "industrial applications of cheap energy, together with a prescription for their transition to solar as a fundamental source of energy, and estimates of their economic value." It's well worth a read, not least for his final rallying cry to go forth and build.Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1 Million from GitHub FounderGovernance structure is a crucial tool for making sure a company can stay true to its purpose. This news about The Ladybird Browser Initiative, which combines a new browser with a 501(c)(3) to ensure it can remain independent and ad-free, is a hopeful case for fighting back against treating "the user like the product being sold". I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing more companies treated customers, including me, that way. I'll be keeping my eye on this one, especially how its choices ripple out into the ecosystem around it.