There are Zero-Day Exploits for Your Mind

Glasswing BrainUpdate: this article got published by Quillette! Below is a short preview:In March 2016, the world was about to watch a paradigm shift. Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo team challenged Lee Sedol, the world champion of Go, to a competition. Go is the oldest and most complex strategy game ever created, played continuously for over 2,500 years. It has more possible board positions than there are atoms in the universe, and it was considered the exclusive province of the human mind. Researchers guessed that AI was at least a decade away from competing at the top level.Sedol predicted that he would win in a landslide. He lost the first game. In the second game, on move 37, AlphaGo made a move that made no sense to anyone watching. Sedol got up and left the room for fifteen minutes. Commentators thought it was a mistake, a clear vindication of human superiority. But it wasn’t a mistake. The AI was playing in a part of the game that the human mind had never explored. This seminal…