AlphaZero, a modified version of AlphaGo Zero, the improved AI that ran circles around AlphaGo that utterly trounced the world's best human Go player last year, has taught itself chess from scratch. AlphaGo Zero reached a level where it did not lose a single game in a match of 100 games against the world's strongest Chess AI, Stockfish. In rule-based domains such as Chess or even Go, this system seems to have reached apparently God-like powers. In Go, 3000 years of study by humans was surpassed in mere months of self-study. This time all Chess knowledge, both human and AI, was mastered and superseded in four hours.
The technological singularity is near. Signs of accelerating change are cropping up. The rise of cryptocurrencies is perhaps one of them. The older generations have a tendency to dismiss it as a mere bubble and them having no intrinsic value. It feels as if we were approaching a black hole beginning to rip apart the fabric of our reality.