AlphaZero

A few months after demonstrating its dominance over the game of Go, DeepMind’s AlphaZero AI has trounced the world’s top-ranked chess engine—and it did so without any prior knowledge of the game and after just four hours of self-training.

AlphaZero taught itself its first chess lesson. The quality of chess in game two was a just a tiny bit better than the first. Nine hours and 44 million games of split-personality chess later, AlphaZero had (very possibly) taught itself enough to become the greatest chess player, silicon- or carbon-based, of all time.

And a provocative generalization from Kissinger's article in The Atlantic:

"On its own, in just a few hours of self-play, [AlphaZero] achieved a level of skill that took human beings 1,500 years to attain. Only the basic rules of the game were provided to AlphaZero. Neither human beings nor human-generated data were part of its process of self-learning. If AlphaZero was able to achieve this mastery so rapidly, where will AI be in five years? What will be the impact on human cognition generally? What is the role of ethics in this process, which consists in essence of the acceleration of choices? . . .. . . The Enlightenment started with essentially philosophical insights spread by a new technology [printing]. Our period is moving in the opposite direction. It has generated a potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy."